There has been a lot of fuss in the news recently about opposition to the construction of mosques in the US – from Temecula Valley to Ground Zero. The most notable piece of micro-rhetoric has been Sarah Palin’s anguished tweet regarding the proposed construction of an Islamic cultural centre and mosque very close to what many regard as the ‘cemetery’ of 9/11 victims: ‘Peace-seeking Muslims, pls understand, Ground Zero mosque is UNNECESSARY provocation; it stabs hearts. Pls reject it in interest of healing.’

The ostensible concern is that mosques will become ‘hotbeds of radical Islam’, schools for terrorists. On the face of it, this seems unlikely. Does terrorism really benefit from having this sort of official infrastructure and visibility? Radicalization rarely happens via institutional channels. Indeed, the counter-argument is that the provision of sufficient legitimate public places for congregation and worship is more likely to mitigate the impetus towards militancy than to exacerbate it; and conversely, that opposing the construction of mosques will only reinforce the impression that Americans are bigoted and racist.

Anthony Thiselton’s hefty book (649 pages) The Hermeneutics of Doctrine is persuading me to reconsider my instinctive distrust of a mode of theological discourse that suffers from many of the intellectual shortcomings of modern rationalism and is very often at odds with biblical interpretation. My distrust is not without justification. Thiselton cites Richard Heyduck’s analysis of the current marginalization and neglect of doctrine in the church, agreeing that it is to be attributed to ‘the emergence of individualism and an individual-centred epistemology’ (xix).

But Thiselton, who served for 25 years on the Church of England Doctrine Commission, believes that biblical hermeneutics has the resources to ‘inject life into engagement with doctrine’ in the same way that it has resourced biblical reading (xxii). I am only a short way into the book, but two important presuppositions have emerged which have interesting implications for New Testament interpretation.

My book The Future of the People of God: Reading Romans Before and After Western Christendom has just become available at Amazon.com. Backcover information about the book can be found in this post.

Daniel Kirk asks a great question: Is Christianity really any good for the world? ‘Is the world a better place because of our allegiance to Christ? Or are all the moves toward making the world a better place done by others and baptized by us?’ What prompted the soul-searching was the observation that the church in the West has only very belatedly woken up to the impending environmental crisis. The same could be said, Kirk suggests, for the church’s belittling treatment of women. He sees grounds for optimism, however, and describes three areas where ‘Christians have been, and are acting as, leading voices in changing the world for the better right now’.

I have just noticed that The Future of the People of God: Reading Romans Before and After Western Christendom is now available on the Wipf and Stock website (also available on Amazon). I haven’t actually got my own hands on a copy yet, but one should be winging its way to Dubai right now. There’s a description of the book below, along with the back cover endorsements, but basically, in a nutshell, the argument is that by locating Paul’s Letter to the Romans firmly and transparently in a narrative-historical framework, with the Jewish War, the persecution of the churches, and the eventual victory over paganism potentially in view, we not only gain a more cogent understanding of Paul’s ‘theology’, we also put ourselves in a better position to reconstruct our identity as the people of God in this brave new post-Christendom, post-modern world.

I had set out to respond rather briefly to some remarks made by paulf in a comment on my “The kingdom of God: not ‘now and not yet’” post, but in the excitement that response has swollen to the proportions of a whole new post. Paulf stated:

The imminent kindgom of God, which was a new world order ruled by Israel through YHWH, is a simple concept that would have been a staple of Jewish thought in the time of Jesus. It was promised in the Hebrew Bible and was what Jews would have hoped for, whether they believed in an afterlife or not. It was the key to the message of both Jesus and Paul.

But, he argues, ‘it never happened, which was a big problem’. Jesus said that people standing with him would see the kingdom come; and Paul advised against marriage because the world was ‘on the verge of being transformed by this new kingdom’. So either they were wrong or this coming ‘kingdom’ has to be treated as a metaphor for something else, something essentially spiritual and invisible in nature. That seems to me a too restrictive dichotomy. I think we can take seriously the public, political form of the ‘kingdom of God’ as it is described in the New Testament without dismissing the clear sense of urgency that is widely attached to it. In other words, both Paul and Jesus spoke of imminent and foreseeable events and were right to do so.

David Fitch has posted a series of articles presenting a thoughtful and constructive critique of the emerging/missional church. He looks at Peter Rollins’ deconstructionist approach to scripture and warns that it risks de-incarnationalizing the Word of God; he raises concerns about Brian McLaren’s de-eschatologization of the kingdom of God; and in the third article he argues that the sort of approach to mission advocated by Alan Hirsch (pictured) and Michael Frost in books such as The Shaping of Things to Come has a potentially de-ecclesiologizing impact on the relationship between church and society. There is also a helpful introductory post: ‘The Three Potential (ideological) Traps of Emerging Missional Theology.’

Here I want to pick up on the third argument and suggest that while in the short term there is an important debate to be had regarding the tension between a radical missiology and a cautious ecclesiology, there are long term changes taking place (both historical and theological) that are likely to necessitate a more radical reappraisal of the biblical narrative and how it forms the self-understanding of the people of God.