I’ve put this up for a couple of reasons. First, I’m pulling together some ideas for teaching on Acts at a mission conference in the summer, and a rough narrative outline is a good place to start, though how much use I’ll make of it remains to be seen.

Secondly, someone got in touch recently asking if I could recommend a commentary on Acts that takes a narrative-historical line. Not really, to be honest. I imagine Tom Wright’s [amazon:978-0281053087:inline] would go some way in the right direction. I’m also looking forward to Steve Walton’s commentary when it eventually appears. Robert Wall reads Acts as part of a “master” story about “what God has done to bring salvation to the world” ([amazon:978-0687278237:inline], 18). That rather downplays the “kingdom” motif, I think. I haven’t made much use of Craig Keener’s incomplete [amazon:978-0801048364:inline], but judging by the introduction it appears to take a more or less standard approach—historical-critical, on the one hand, salvation-historical, on the other.

In a comment on my recent post It’s not eschatology, folks, it’s just a story Ian Paul kindly took me to task for not consulting Dick France’s commentary on Matthew. I used his commentary on Mark when writing The Coming of the Son of Man, but the Matthew commentary came out a couple of years later. I have since got hold of a copy, and I have to say, it hasn’t changed my view.

France’s argument is basically that whereas in Mark 13 Jesus speaks only about the fall of Jerusalem and its significance for the renewal of God’s people, in Matthew 24-25 he makes a fundamental temporal distinction between the vindication of the Son of Man in conjunction with the destruction of the temple and the parousia of the Son of Man at the close of the age. There are five main lines of support for this argument, which I have summarized below. I give my reasons for not being persuaded. Be warned. It’s a little complex….

I spent some time with the staff of a church in south London this week talking about “eschatology”. Which is half the problem. As long as we treat eschatology as a more or less independent sub-section of—or worse, appendix to—our general theology, we have no frame of reference, nowhere to anchor it. So my argument was that eschatology is simply an aspect or part of the story, just as soteriology and ecclesiology and pneumatology are not independent topics but ways of speaking about what is going on in a narrative. Take the arguments and beliefs out of the story and they have no real reason to exist.

To make the point, we went through the “apocalyptic discourse” in Mark 13 looking at how Jesus draws on the scriptures to tell a compelling story about the real and foreseeable future of first century Israel and to explain to his disciples what it will mean for them. Here I will do the same thing with Matthew 24, setting the passage in the context of Jesus’ final week in order to underline the point that this is not free-floating teaching on the end times. It arises directly out of the preceding events.

In order to keep my knee-jerk prejudices against certain aspects of traditional evangelical theology in good working order I have been reading [amazon:978-1433531620:inline], edited by Grudem, Collins and Schreiner. What I have been looking for is examples of how theologians really don’t get narrative, and I have not been disappointed. Thomas R. Schreiner begins the section on the New Testament by affirming that biblical theology, unlike systematic theology, “concentrates on the historical story line of the Bible”, and then proceeds to outline “some of the main themes of New Testament theology” (109). In other words, he’s incapable of dealing with the “historical story line” without systematizing it.

The first of the main themes is the “already-not-yet” of the kingdom, which Schreiner thinks “dominates the entire New Testament and functions as a key to grasping the whole story”. I’ve discussed this before, but I’ll discuss it again.

There is a simple, universal or cosmic or existential narrative of the cross—the horizontal beam. Humanity has fallen, every individual person has sinned and must go by way of the cross to gain eternal life. But, for all its merits, this is a theological abstraction. It is not the biblical narrative.

The biblical narrative of the cross is not universal or cosmic or existential and it is nothing like as simple. It is historical—the vertical piece, which sustains whatever else we may wish to say.

It arises out of the story of ancient Israel. The brutal execution of Jesus by the Romans is a critical moment in the story of how the descendants of Abraham made the long and arduous journey from exile to empire, from judgment to justification, from sin to forgiveness, from Law to Spirit, from death to the life of the age to come.

I’ll make this my last post on Bird, et al.’s lively—bordering on manic—response to Bart Ehrman’s book [amazon:978-0061778186:inline]. Chris Tilling is a good friend, so I need to tread a little carefully here. His argument is based largely on his published PhD thesis [amazon:978-3161518652:inline], which I have read and greatly enjoyed.

In chapter 6 of [amazon:978-0310519591:inline] he puts forward an analysis and critique of Ehrman’s basic christological narrative. At the heart of Ehrman’s project, Tilling thinks, is the distinction between “exaltation Christologies” and an “incarnational Christology”….