Some years ago I proposed a thought experiment as a way of grasping something of the strangeness of scripture:

It makes for an interesting thought experiment to consider what would have happened if the early Jewish Christians had been driven from Jerusalem into the desert. What if, under threat of destruction from an invading Roman army, they had concealed their writings in caves and then, like the sectarians of Qumran, had disappeared off the screen of history? And suppose that nineteen hundred years later those writings were discovered by a Bedouin shepherd boy and fell into the hands of a culture that had never known the Christian church. What would that culture make of them? We can hardly subtract the influence of Christianity from modern Western culture, even from modern secular rationalism. But this is only a thought-experiment: how would people react to these writings and their claims about a Jewish teacher called Jesus without all the intellectual baggage of Christian tradition, without the preconception that this a definitive story about God, perhaps without much of an idea about God at all?

Remarkably, it appears that something very close to this may actually have happened….

There’s an important section in Kenton Sparks’ God’s Word in Human Words in which he discusses how we might discern positive “trajectories” that may enable us to reach moral or theological conclusions beyond—or perhaps even in contradiction to—explicit affirmations in the biblical text. Slavery provides an example. The Old Testament allowed for the harsh treatment of slaves (eg. Exod. 21:20-21). The New Testament tolerated the practice, but by introducing the potential for a quite radical egalitarianism (cf. Gal. 3:28) based on love established a trajectory that eventually—with some prodding from “the Enlightenment and its emphasis on human dignity and individual freedom” and despite well-meaning opposition from evangelicals such as George Whitefield and Charles Hodge—landed at the morally and theologically correct abolition of slavery in the West (289-93).

I have come across a number of people recently who, in their different ways, appear to agree that the future of evangelicalism lies ideally in a convergence of the New Perspective and emerging-missional forms of church. The question has been, though, whether such a convergence has any chance of happening given the powerful currents pulling the big ship of modern evangelicalism in quite different directions. What this diagram attempts to highlight are what seem to me to be the two main tensions or questions in the process of establishing a viable, biblically credible alternative to the old Christendom model. The diagram doesn’t solve anything but perhaps it will bring a little clarity.

With all the depressing talk of hell recently it seems a good idea to turn our minds in a more positive direction and give some thought to what the alternative might be. My view is that the New Testament does not make “heaven” the normal destination for those who are saved. What we have is essentially a limited “martyr theology”, worked out within a broader “meta-narrative” about the renewal of creation.

The argument goes roughly—very roughly—like this. The restoration of Israel is brought about through the death and resurrection of Jesus, which is a “new creation” event, an “ontological novelty”. There is as yet, however, no “new creation”, no “new heavens and new earth”, in which to accommodate the resurrected Jesus, so he is exalted to the right hand of the Father, as Israel’s king, from where he will reign throughout the coming ages until such time as this authority to rule may be handed back to the Father (cf. 1 Cor. 15:24)—the point being that the security and integrity of the people of God can be maintained only by the Lamb who was slain.

As a (moderately) good postmodern—and as a student of literature rather than of history—I have tended to avoid many of the problems raised by historical-criticism regarding the factual integrity and coherence of the Bible. The reason is that I think that the more interesting and more pressing problem for modern evangelicalism has to do not with whether the texts are demonstrably true as historical records but with what they are actually saying as historical records. To put it another way, it is not the factual distortions of the singular dogma of inerrancy that need to be corrected so much as the interpretive distortions of the multiple theological constructs that make up the evangelical belief system. What sort of story is actually being told here?

The so-called New Perspective has come up a few times recently here, not least because it has a significant bearing on how we understand New Testament teaching about wrath, judgment, “hell”, and salvation. My impression is that the New Perspective is still largely confined to the academic sphere and that we are only slowly beginning to grasp its revolutionary implications. So Kent Yinger’s nifty and very readable book [amazon:978-1608994632:inline] (Wipf & Stock, 2011) is a timely resource for the church as it struggles to rethink its identity and purpose.