I hope it’s not too immodest to draw attention to a review of my book The Future of the People of God by Matthew Montonini that begins:

Actually, I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve attempted to schematize the relationship between history and theology. But I think it is central to the current theological task, so another attempt won’t go amiss. Modern evangelical theology is largely an abstraction. It is a very basic abstraction, very communicable, in many ways very appealing, and it can have a powerful impact on people’s lives. But a price has been paid for this accommodation to the narrow, privatized domain of modern religiosity.

First, it has made it very difficult for us to read scripture well, because the whole chaotic, glorious thing has somehow to be chopped up, pared down, allegorized, and in various ways misinterpreted in order to fit into a very small conceptual box.

Secondly, we have a very weak grasp of what is in fact the central narrative element in the Bible—the concrete historical existence of a people called in Abraham, in reaction against socially constructed blasphemy, to be a corporate, visible and credible witness to the full reality of new creation. In my view, this is why we find it so hard to integrate social and environmental values into our life and witness.

I will be at the Society of Biblical Literature International Meeting in London next week. First time to go to one of these things. I will be presenting a paper in the Paul and Pauline Literature section on Monday afternoon on “Sibylline Oracles and the Judgment of the Greeks”, but the other contributions look like they will be much more interesting and probably much more scholarly. If you’re going to be there, please look out for me.

There are a number of well known “misreadings” of prophecy in the New Testament, where the writer, in his enthusiasm to prove that Jesus is Israel’s messiah, appears to have found a meaning in the text that simply is not there—rather as a magician pulls a rabbit out of an empty hat. It’s a great illusion. It might fool the credulous. But really! Anyone with an ounce of grammatical-historical sense will protest that it’s just a simple trick.

A case in point is Matthew’s claim that the return of Jesus from Egypt to the land of Israel fulfilled the prophecy, “Out of Egypt I called my son” (Matt. 2:15). It was mentioned by Jonathan yesterday in relation to the discussion of the messianic interpretation of Genesis 3:15. Jonathan suggests that it is an example of a rabbinic interpretive method known as remezim or “hints”. He refers to a very good article by his father on the whole subject of how the New Testament makes use of the Jewish scriptures. But I think there is something else going on here.

Phil Wood, who writes an Anabaptist blog from the UK, made this comment yesterday in response to The Church is dead?:

I was talking a little while ago with a friend who has a senior role in an American Mennonite Conference. We had a long discussion when I said that in Britain we were ahead on the Post-Christendom curve but what’s UK today will be US tomorrow. Britain is the oldest industrialized country in the world. I don’t think it’s a surprise that so many of these trends (the breakdown of community too) have their origins here. Whether the decline virus is 100% communicable is another question. If I were being hopeful I would say that before the curve reaches the vibrant churches of the global south we might have learned a thing or two about being Christians without Constantine.

We could picture the current state of affairs in this way: the UK church is in the front carriage of a train that has already been pulled over the precipice into catastrophic decline by the runaway engine of secular rationalism; the church in the US is not far behind, and anyone leaning out of the window will see what is coming; but the global church is still some way back, thoroughly enjoying the ride.

In a post on Out of Ur Skye Jethani discusses reports of the decline of the Southern Baptist Convention and of the evangelical church in North America more generally: “50 churches are closing every week, church attendance is not keeping pace with population growth, and the average age of church members is going up”. He thinks that the evidence cannot be gainsaid, but he is reassured by the words of Dallas Willard: “I am not discouraged, because I believe that Christ is in charge of his church, with all of its warts, and moles, and hairs. He knows what he is doing and he is marching on.”

Jethani is also reassured by the evidence from his trip to the Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization that “the global church is more than surviving… it’s thriving!” He concludes: ‘So, while many both inside and outside the family of God take some perverse pleasure in declaring “The church is dead,” we can with full faith and confidence shout in response, “Long live the Church!”’ I am delighted that the global church is thriving, but I have some questions.

It is a basic error of modern evangelicalism that it has over-compressed the biblical narrative in order to provide a simple, user-friendly “gospel” for the practical purposes of personal evangelism, pastoral instruction, and the highly subjective forms of worship that prevail in our churches. My concern here is much less with the simple gospel—“Jesus died for my sins” is a good enough post-biblical shorthand—than with the horrible deformation of biblical thought.

The doctrine of atonement is a good example. Evangelicalism has taken the three-dimensional political narrative of atonement that we find in the New Testament and reduced it to a two-dimensional theory of personal salvation.