Peter has reached the point of sheer exasperation in our discussion of the meaning of Jesus’ parable of the wise and foolish virgins, so it is time to stop, apologize, and perhaps try to understand why it can be so difficult to reach agreement over matters of biblical interpretation.

The main challenge of New Testament theology at the moment, as the church struggles more or less self-consciously to come to terms with its modern exile, is to tell and retell the story of which Jesus is part – to tell it both critically and hopefully, in a way that brings out its complexity without suppressing its evangelical force, in a way that subverts our dogmatic preoccupations and renews the rhetoric of faith, in a way that not only brings clarity and conviction but also fires the theological imagination to engender abundant forms of new life.

For much of the last decade the tide of popular-level evangelical theology – by which I mean theology as it engages constructively with the life and mission of the church – has been moving strongly in an emerging direction. At least, that has been my perception. Over the last couple of years, however, the tide appears to have shifted direction dramatically, and storms of a rather different controversy have been brewing.

I noted recently that a resurgent neo-Reformed movement appears to have turned its guns from the emerging church, or what’s left of it, to the mainstream of moderate and theologically easy-going evangelicalism. Roger E. Olson has a post offering a slightly different perspective. He traces the emergence of a marauding modern Calvinism back to the early 1990s, and his concern is with its assault on evangelical Arminianism rather than on the emerging church. But he registers the same alarm at the determination of Calvinists to reshape evangelicalism in their own image – and at the stifling of debate, the exclusion of dissenters from seminaries, the inflammatory rhetoric of heresy, and the heavy-handed propaganda that have been the product of it.

This is why I don’t like systematic theologies. I picked up a copy of John M. Frame’s Salvation Belongs to the Lord: An introduction to systematic theology today – it’s amazing what you can find in Dubai, as long as it’s Reformed. The book is a classic example of how theologians instinctively and unself-critically read a predetermined theology back into the biblical texts.

Frame admits rather disingenuously that if he were free to invent his own religion, eternal punishment would not be part of it. As it is, he says, ‘I must teach only what the Bible teaches, and the Bible certainly has a lot to say about eternal punishment’ (297). What is wrong with us that we have no qualms about teaching something of such profound moral and spiritual significance that we don’t actually agree with?

In the discussion prompted by my post on ‘The parables of delay and the question of dual fulfilment’ paulf argued that it’s impossible to resolve the tension in Jesus’ apocalyptic discourse between the early references to the destruction of Jerusalem and the later statement about the Son of man: ‘we know from history that the son of man did not come through the clouds and set up a kingdom.’ So either Jesus was wrong, which many have argued; or he was speaking about something that would happen in an entirely different time-frame, presumably at the end of history.

The Biologos Foundation, which ‘addresses the central themes of science and religion and emphasizes the compatibility of Christian faith with scientific discoveries about the origins of the universe and life’, has come up with a statement of faith, shamelessly cribbed from 1 Corinthians 15:1-5:

Now, brothers, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain. For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve.