One of the objections most forcefully raised against a consistent narrative-historical reading of the New Testament is that it makes the texts more or less irrelevant as a source of teaching and inspiration for the church today. Peter Wilkinson expressed this objection in a recent comment in no uncertain terms:

Hereon in we are in uncharted, post-biblical waters, and left to sink or swim, to put it crudely, according to our own devices. There is no biblical matrix left in which we can locate ourselves. That’s a huge problem with your approach, and whenever the issue arises of what now for the church, you don’t have a lot to say. I find this inevitable conclusion of your approach, as it currently stands, rather incredible.

For reasons which I won’t disclose, I have been working through a doctrine course of a distinctly Reformed hue. If the church is convinced that it needs such a thing as a “doctrine course”, Reformed or otherwise, then this is by no means a bad one. But for me it has highlighted again the fact that so much theological activity puts the cart before the horse.

Let me give an example. The section on the Trinity lists a number of biblical texts as “evidence” for the belief that Jesus is God. The assumption is that the doctrine or belief is a given fact and basically beyond dispute; biblical prooftexts may be adduced as evidence for it, but this is merely a formality and certainly does not require anything as troublesome as exegesis.

That is very different to reading Matthew 9:4, say, and considering how Jesus’ insight into the thoughts of the scribes is to be explained, from which it is unlikely that we would draw the conclusion that he is omniscient and therefore God. It is very different to reading Matthew 9:1-8 and asking about the significance of the fact that authority has been given to men to forgive sins—the passage virtually rules out the conclusion that Jesus was God.

The history of biblical interpretation is a tale of two cities—not London and Paris (Dickens), or even Jerusalem and Athens (Tertullian), but Alexandria and Antioch. In the third and fourth centuries Alexandria stood for an allegorizing approach to interpretation that sought to maximize the theological payload of a sacred text. Antioch stood for a more constrained approach that was more concerned to uncover the original historical meaning of the text than to exploit it to meet the theological needs and prejudices of the later reading community. The chart shows very roughly how this division has persisted right through the history of interpretation—indeed, it is arguably the defining feature of the history of interpretation. If anyone wants to suggest significant corrections or additions to it, please let me know.

I have long harboured the suspicion that in certain respects, in certain habits of thought, modern evangelicalism has more in common with second century Gnosticism than with first century Christianity. I accept that the analogy is impressionistic and cannot be pushed very far, but I still think that there is something in the view that modern evangelicalism operates with a core a-historical redeemer myth not so different from Gnostic redeemer myths: the redeemer descends into the world to rescue people from their sins and, in the end, transport them to their true home in heaven. This mythicized narrative controls much of the language of evangelical piety, worship, evangelism, and popular theology. It barely makes contact with the biblical narrative of a historically situated people.