This pointed question was posed by Zach Hoag in a brief conversation about Jesus and violence that I was following on Twitter over the new year:

Honest Q: Is there tension between the “Jesus-looking God” of neo-anabaptists & the “1st century Jewish Jesus” of the new perspectivists?

I am not an Anabaptist—though like many evangelicals today I have a lot of respect for the moral and theological integrity of the Anabaptist position; and I can’t say for sure what the Anabaptist God looks like. But I imagine that he eschews violence, in some sense shares in the suffering of the cross, has been re-cast in the image of Jesus, is opposed to empire, identifies with the oppressed… and must have been deeply disappointed with the church for its post-Constantinian accommodation to political and cultural power.

Is that the God that we find in the New Testament? For that matter, is this the Jesus that we find in the New Testament? Here are some new perspectivist or, as I prefer, narrative-historical thoughts on the matter….

I haven’t done this before, but it seems a cheap and cheerful way to bring the year to an end. I got the idea from Brian LePort at Near Emmaus. It’s an inexact exercise. I know which posts received the most hits over the last year, but obviously those which went into the vineyard early have earned more than those which went in late. So what follows is more a personal selection from among the most popular posts with one or two later ones artificially bumped up the order—such is grace. Happy New Year!

The Gospel Coalition has a blog post by Joe Carter: 9 Things You Should Know About Christmas. It’s all fairly trivial stuff: Jesus probably wasn’t born on December 25th, there’s no mention of a donkey in the texts, we don’t know how many wise men there were, Martin Luther disapproved of Santa Claus but may have been the first person to decorate a Christmas tree with lights, and so on. Nothing that’s going to break any paradigms there.

I would add a more substantial misconception—if you’ll excuse the pun. Contrary to popular belief, Christmas is not about an incarnation (“Hail the incarnate Deity!”). It’s about the birth of a king (“Glory to the newborn King!”). The New Testament does not construct the divinity of Jesus on the stories of his birth. I have a lot of marking to do before the end of the year, so I’ll keep this brief.

The controlling New Testament story about the resurrected Jesus is that he is seated at the right hand of the Father, having received authority to judge and rule over the nations. The thought runs from his words to Caiaphas (Matt. 26:64; Lk. 22:69), through the preaching first of the early church in Jerusalem (Acts 2:33-34; 5:31; 7:56), then of the apostles in the Greek-Roman world (Rom. 8:34; Eph. 1:20; Col. 3:1; Heb. 1:3; 12:2), to John’s climactic vision of the martyrs reigning with Christ, at the right hand of God, throughout the coming ages (Rev. 20:4). Behind it lies the influential and highly “political” promise made to Israel’s king in Psalm 110:

The LORD says to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.” The LORD sends forth from Zion your mighty scepter. Rule in the midst of your enemies! (Ps. 110:1-2)

This is not, by and large, the story that modern evangelicalism tells. The modern evangelical Jesus spends most of his time not sitting at the right hand of God but living in the heart of the believer; and a person is converted to this faith by explicitly inviting Jesus into his or her heart.

I am recording a couple of video lectures next week on 1 and 2 Thessalonians. The approach I want to take is to highlight the story that lies behind the two letters, constructed partly from the more or less credible account of Paul’s time in Thessalonica that Luke provides (Acts 17:1-9), partly from Paul’s own record of the circumstances of his preaching there, but more significantly from the extensive eschatological material for which 1 and 2 Thessalonians are well known.

I’m assuming that both letters were written by Paul, that the First preceded the Second, and that they were separated from each other by a relatively short period of time. What this post does is tell this story, which is the story of how Israel’s God intended to put an end to pagan hegemony through the faithful witness of such communities as the “church of the Thessalonians”. It overlaps somewhat with a recent post on 1 Thessalonians as a “document of eschatological formation”.

I’m working my way through the first of the two volumes that make up N.T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God. So far it’s all fascinating background stuff about the eschatological narratives of the Pharisees, the philosophies of the Greeks, and the religion and politics of the Romans, all wrapped up in an elaborate ornithological metaphor.

There are a few points that I would like to highlight. One (for now) is a comment made somewhat in passing at the beginning of his assessment of the “reality” of the Roman empire in the first century, which stood out because it lends support to one of my main working theses:

By the time Paul was born, the empire of Augustus Caesar stretched from one sea to another—the Black Sea to the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean to the English Channel—and from the river Euphrates to the ends of the known world, the far western outposts of Spain and France. There, of course, lay the problem for the devout Jew: that was more or less the extent of empire which the Psalmist had promised to the Messiah. (284)

I’ve been engaged in a little exercise with some friends rewriting a mission organization’s statement of faith. What I have presented below is my reworking of a rough, more cautious, but actually rather effective first attempt to make “a bit of a narrative out of our core beliefs, rather than a bunch of rigid, stand alone statements”. How much of my more elaborate and idiosyncratic version will survive corporate scrutiny remains to be seen. It has rather less missional oomph to it.

We didn’t set out with a very clear set of guidelines. My sense is that we wanted primarily to get away from the ponderous and defensive doctrinalism of traditional statements of faith. We wanted to construct it more or less in narrative form, though it remains explicitly a statement of belief—a way of saying, “These things matter to us.” We wanted to bring the full story of God’s people back into focus to counter the unremitting individualism of modern expressions of faith. We wanted to highlight the missional dynamics of the story. We wanted it to be compelling.

We didn’t want it to be voguishly postmodern or so unlike traditional statements of faith that people could not see the connection, though I suspect I may have erased a little too much of the language of orthodoxy.