It’s a while since I’ve posted anything here. Been a bit too busy. So I thought I’d post this response to Elliot’s recent comment—just to keep the site ticking over.

I did something like this a few years back—now updated (what are we to make of the Quiet Revival, etc.?) and better focused. It will be a six week series of online sessions on what I would basically describe here as a narrative-historical missional theology. In other words, how does the church in the West align its constructive engagement with the world (mission) with the story of God and his people through history? This recent post will give you an idea of the approach taken.

The question of Israel and the land—and the extent of the land—is very much on our minds these days. A while back, Ian Paul posed the question: “Does the State of Israel have a divine right to the land?” It’s a measured piece, and it got me wondering—not for the first time—how this issue might look in narrative-historical perspective.

The “West” is a complex civilisational phenomenon. It is pagan Europe converted to Christianity, divested of Eastern Orthodoxy, intellectually reinvigorated by the Renaissance, violently split between Protestantism and Catholicism, expanded by Colonisation, empowered and enriched by the Industrial Revolution, disenchanted by Modernity, shattered by the Great Wars of the twentieth century, and now deeply fractured by a Crisis of Identity at all levels of society. What does it mean to be white? What does it mean to have been so privileged? What does it mean to be female or male or whatever?

When do we talk about divine judgment? Not often. But the theme cuts right through the heartlands of the New Testament like a punishing Roman road (not that Roman road), from Mary’s Magnificat to the final judgment of all the dead in Revelation 20.

The two most important commandments, according to Jesus, are to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” and to “love your neighbour as yourself” (Matt. 22:37-40). Add to this his teaching about love for enemies, while perhaps quietly sidelining the commandment to love God, and we have the defining Christian ethic for the modern era. How should we respond to the refugee, the migrant, the asylum seeker, the foreigner, the Muslim, the Jew in our midst? We should love our neighbours, we should love our enemies.

The standard argument about the “image of God” is that 1) humanity was created, male and female, “in the image, according to the likeness” of God; 2) this “image” somehow encapsulates the essential nature and dignity of humanity; 3) the image was broken or lost in the “fall”; 4) it was reinstated in the perfect humanity of Christ; and 5) believers are being progressively conformed to the reinstated image of God in a new creation.