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.

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.