With the Platinum Jubilee celebrations in full swing here in the UK, it’s easy to forget that it’s Pentecost Sunday this weekend. To compensate for the oversight and to make sure that the narrative-historical perspective doesn’t get neglected, here is a series of seven posts that I did ten years ago on the theme of the Holy Spirit. It looks like a couple more might be needed—on the gifts of the Spirit in the church, perhaps, and the Spirit in Revelation? Anything else?

Allan Bevere makes the important point that Jesus was not crucified because he went around telling people to love one another. “It doesn’t take a profound thinker to know that the primary motivation for this dehistorizing and detheologizing of Jesus is to domesticate his life and work into something more palatable to modern sensibilities.” I’m not sure about the “detheologizing” of Jesus. In many ways, that seems to me to be a rather good thing to do.

In the six week course I have been doing on “missional church” for King’s School of Theology I have made quite extensive use of the story of Paul’s visit to Athens in Acts 17:16-34 to underline the point that mission in the New Testament is not about the salvation of individuals, it is a call to people groups to align themselves with the God of history.

I have been having an online conversation with someone who is rather suspicious of the charts I have been using (such as the one below) to map the story of the people of God throughout the ages. One of the problems is that I have not defined the y-axis.

Frankly, it is an absurdity that we still have such a hard time making sense of Jesus’ core proclamation about the kingdom of God. The problem comes up again in another book by Alan Roxburgh on “missional church,” this time co-written with Scott Boren: Introducing the Missional Church: What It Is, Why It Matters, How to Become One (2009).

In their book Practices for the Refounding of God’s People: The Missional Challenge of the West (2018), Alan Roxburgh and Martin Robinson first offer a rather pessimistic analysis of the consequences of modernity’s “wager” (the metaphor is Adam Seligman’s) in letting go of its Christian past, and then propose a model for re-establishing a viable Christian presence in “liminal spaces.”

Edwin has an interesting question about the link between Jesus’ furious condemnation of the Jerusalem hierarchy and his subsequent vindication:

I have been trying to get to the point where I have my aha moment in this reframing of the biblical story and what it would mean for Jesus’s message of judgement to be vindicated in his resurrection. Does it mean all his denunciations were backed by God and his moral teachings for following God rightly, without corruption, would now be authoritative, thus silencing the debates between the competing Jewish traditions?

So are the vindication and enthronement of Jesus an overruling of the “competing Jewish traditions” and a validation of his particular vision for Israel?