My friend Hilary has been reading The Future of the People of God and had a question about a paragraph on page 49. Since it has reference to one of the critical arguments of the book – that the parameters of Paul’s theology in the Letter are to be historically defined – I thought perhaps it would be worth responding at some length here rather than on Facebook. Here is Hilary’s question:

…you argue first that belief in the resurrection of Jesus ‘provoked a radical re-evaluation’ of the way in which the Jews understood their faith, but at the end of the same paragraph, you write: ‘Is the resurrection of Jesus a matter of such theological and metaphysical novelty that it rewrites the terms of the whole debate?’ – obviously expecting the answer ‘no’. Surely for Paul more than anyone, the resurrection of Jesus WAS such a novel way of God demonstrating his purposes that the whole debate did have to be rewritten – isn’t that what Romans is?

Brian LePort (Near Emmaus) suggests, not unreasonably, that the more pertinent question is not whether the emergent church has a problem with the doctrine of a final judgment (see previous post) but whether the emergent church still exists. I have to say, I did wonder whether I should add a qualification to the effect that the debate over emerging epistemology, eschatology, etc., now seems rather passé. There was a flurry of obituaries a few months back (eg., Michael Patton) lamenting the death of the emerging church – and my loss of interest or confidence in the Open Source Theology model had a lot to do with a subconscious realization that the spirit of postmodern enquiry driving it had rather fizzled out.

I have no idea really whether brand Emergent still has a viable market presence, and in any case, the perspective from Europe on the emerging phenomenon has always been rather different. In Europe the emerging movement was largely a reaction to the perceived failure and irrelevance of modern churches; in the US it was largely a reaction to the success (and accompanying hubris and complacency) of modern churches.

A tweet from Andrew Jones (‘An original emerging church criticism: “Don’t conceive we crapper undergo Absolute Biblical Truth” ’) led me to Pastor and Author Bob DeWaay’s resolute and curiously robotic critique of the ‘Emergent Church’ on SO4J-TV. On one level the clip reinforces all my prejudices against conservative religious broadcasting. Bob DeWaay is so determined to defend his rationalistic, word-based, doctrinaire orthodoxy that I am left wondering whether he has much idea at all about what is happening (and why) under the banner of ‘emerging’ at the crumbling boundaries of the modern church.

Here’s an interesting thought. In The Hermeneutics of Doctrine (70), as part of a discussion on ‘Christian Doctrine as Dramatic Narrative’, Thiselton notes the argument of L.L. Welborn that ‘tentmaker’ is an unlikely translation of skēnopoios in Acts 18:3. The BDAG Greek Lexicon points to the better attested use of the word in the context of Old Comedy to denote a ‘stagehand’ or ‘manufacturer of stage properties’. The characters depicted on the vase in the image – slaves helping an old man to climb some stage scenery – are wearing grotesquely exaggerated costumes characteristic of Old Comedy.

The problem is that outside the New Testament skēnopoios is used only in the theatrical sense or figuratively to describe the construction of an impermanent dwelling. That could refer to a tent, but there is nothing in the context of Acts 18:3 to resolve the sense in favour of ‘tentmaker’.

Michael Thompson correctly points out that the argument about blessing and righteousness and the Deuteronomic code would be helped if we kept in view the seminal statement in Genesis 12:3 that Israel would be blessed in order to be a blessing to the whole world. In other words, there are missional implications: it is not only our ‘blessing’ that is compromised by a lack of attention to the concrete communal and individual behaviours that count as ‘righteousness’; it is the ‘blessing’ of others. So what can we learn from the ‘blessed to be a blessing’ motif in scripture?

I like the church that we go to. I like its exuberance and energy and robust conviction that God is a living, dynamic, transformative, communicating, healing presence in the midst of the community. But you have to wonder about the hermeneutics sometimes.

We were told this last Friday in what was, in many respects, really a quite challenging sermon about prayer, that God wants to pour out abundant blessings on those who love him or ask him. Reference was made to Deuteronomy 28:1-14. The Lord will set you high above the nations; blessed will be the fruit of your womb, of your ground, of your cattle and flocks, your basket, your kneading bowl; you will lend to other people and not need to borrow; the Lord will make you the head and not the tail, and so on. All you have to do is ask or believe… or something along those lines.

There should be a copy of J.D.G. Dunn’s Did the First Christians Worship Jesus? waiting for me when I next get back to the UK. In the meantime, I have been reading Larry Hurtado’s polemical essay-length review of the book, which contributes to the ongoing and mostly courteous ‘dialogue’ between the two scholars.

Two questions stand out which seem to me to highlight the fact that New Testament Christology does not take adequate account of the fact that the relationship between Jesus and God is determined, in the first place, according to an eschatological narrative – that is, it gains its shape and parameters from the story of the tumultuous journey that the people of God were having to make from Second Temple Judaism under judgment to an eventual ‘inheritance of the nations’ under the lordship of Jesus Christ. The first question has to do with the nature of certain appeals to the risen Jesus in the New Testament; the second with the reasons for Paul’s violent persecution of early Jewish believers.

This review of the review of a book that I haven’t yet read (caveat lector) can be seen as a continuation of the discussion in two recent posts regarding whether Jesus claimed to be God or acted as though he thought he was God.