I have read both Weiss’ Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God and Schweitzer’s The Mystery of the Kingdom of God recently. Both excellent books—up to a point, which I’ll come to—and well worth reading. The significance of their work for the modern understanding of the kingdom of God is neatly captured by Bruce Chilton in his 1996 book Pure Kingdom: Jesus’ Vision of God:

What most of all struck scholars at the end of the [nineteenth] century was that in early Judaism “the kingdom of God” was used neither of an individual’s life after death in heaven nor of a movement of social improvement on earth. Those had been dominant understandings of the kingdom, deeply embedded in the theology and preaching of the period. The brilliant and incontrovertible assertion of the basic significance of eschatology, first by Johannes Weiss and then by Schweitzer, changed all that. They demonstrated that the kingdom of God in early Judaism and in Jesus’ preaching involved God’s final judgment of the world; the concept of the kingdom was part and parcel of anticipation of the last things. (4)

This is a rather technical piece—some notes I made while working on something else—but the gist of the argument can be gained from the introduction and the conclusion. I have been looking at how the idea of a Gentile mission emerges in the New Testament. I made the point in “The parable of the wedding feast and the man without a wedding garment” and the ensuing discussion that Jesus does not contemplate a Gentile mission or the inclusion of Gentiles in the community of his followers before his death. He may have expected Gentiles to be included, or at least involved, at the parousia, but the mission that he inaugurated was basically a Jewish mission to Israel.

Behind Jesus, of course, is the Old Testament, and it is generally held by those who would attribute a Gentile mission to Jesus that the Psalms and the Prophets in particular foresee a day when large numbers of Gentiles will be incorporated into the covenant people. Christopher Wright, for example, has a good section in The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative in which he makes a progressive case to this effect, culminating in the contention that “there were voices and visions within the Old Testament that looked for the day when nations would be included within Israel in such a way that the very word Israel would be radically extended and redefined” (455).

I don’t think I’d noticed this before. I have frequently maintained that what Jesus means by the “judgment of geenna” is not post mortem torment in what we call “hell” but the suffering and destruction that would result from the war against Rome. Basically, the argument is that Jesus adapted the imagery from Jeremiah’s predictions of the horrors of the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem (cf. Jer. 7:30-33; 19:6-8). For lack of space to bury the dead in the city, corpses would be thrown over the walls into the Valley of the Son of Hinnom—the valley of Gehenna—where they would be “food for the birds of the air, and for the beasts of the earth, and none will frighten them away” (Jer. 7:33). For the details see “Hell, the unbiblical doctrine of” and my book Hell and Heaven in Narrative Perspective. But I may have overlooked the significance of this passage….

I’ve been asked a couple of times recently about Matthew’s rather startling and perplexing version of the parable of wedding feast (Matt. 22:1-14). Don Lambirth, for example, sent me this question:

With all the current excitement/dismay in the US surrounding the release of yet another Left Behind film, starring Nicholas Cage, I thought I would offer a quick overview of arguments that I have presented in The Coming of the Son of Man and elsewhere regarding the offending passages. I was chatting with my friend Mike in Seattle about this yesterday (he’s in Seattle, not me, just to be clear). How does this sort of doctrine work in relation to a narrative-historical reading of the New Testament? What has it got to do with the gospel? My concern here is less to discredit the modern dispensationalist notion—it looks like the film is doing a perfectly good job of that itself, with a 2% rating on Rotten Tomatoes—than to relocate the New Testament language in a field of realistic historical expectation.

The question of whether God heals miraculously today—or, for that matter, ever has—is obviously a difficult and contentious one for the church in a rationalist secular context. A comment by James Mercer, however, in connection with my post on the narratives of mission highlights a different and neglected aspect of the issue. Not: Do miracles happen? But: What do miracles mean?

I have just re-read Re:mission and continue to find your narrative of the task of ‘post-biblical’ mission fascinating and encouraging. You identify Jesus’ healing ministry as being intrinsically linked with the forgiveness of Israel’s sins. What place might prayer for healing have within post-biblical mission? I ask as this is a conversation we are having within and between churches in Harrow.

The two questions cannot be treated in isolation from each other. But the biblical narrative suggests that we may be missing the point if we only address the issue of healing as a matter of apologetics, as part of a competition with modernity over whose view of reality is right.

I suggested in passing in a recent post on mission and blessing that in The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative C.J.H. Wright (not to be confused with N.T. Wright) ‘has misconstrued the “grand narrative” of the Bible as oriented towards salvation rather than “kingdom”’. JR Rozko, who is writing what sounds like an intriguing dissertation aiming to “develop a soteriological vision in light of the relationship between the missio Dei and the Kingdom of God”, asked in a comment what I meant by this statement.

Can you unfurl that a bit more? Qualitatively, how do you understand the difference here in Wright? How would you, briefly, reframe this…?

I’ll give it a go….