I did an interview last week with John Morehead, who directs Multifaith Matters. His organisation aims to provide support for individuals, churches, and organisations doing mission in a pluralistic religious context, so we talked about “narrative-historical approaches to the gospel, salvation, hell and multifaith.” I have to say, this was a bold move on John’s part.
A friend rang this morning wanting to know whether the thousands who died, and no doubt are still dying, in the earthquake that devastated the region around Gaziantep and Aleppo last week are now continuing to suffer in some far worse post mortem state of torment or alienation. It may seem the wrong question to be asking in the face of such immense pain and grief, but perhaps we can think of it as a way of opening—fractionally—a theological window on the catastrophe.
I have a lot of work to do on hermeneutics in the coming months. One of the books I am reading is Craig Bartholomew’s Introducing Biblical Hermeneutics: A Comprehensive Framework for Hearing God in Scripture (2015), which seems to be both a general introduction to the field and a defence of a trinitarian hermeneutic—that is, reading the scriptures through a trinitarian lens—in particular. Why a trinitarian hermeneutic is so unhelpful for New Testament interpretation is apparent from this statement (I’m reading on Perlego, so I can’t provide the page number, which is very annoying):
The emphasis on perichoresis in trinitarian doctrine… stresses that while all three persons of the Trinity are involved in all their acts, the Father is particularly associated with creation and Israel, the Son with the fulfillment of redemption, and the Spirit with mission.
This is an odd two-part post. I came across Cleanthes’ “Hymn to Zeus” in Mike Bird’s Jesus among the gods: Early Christology in the Greco-Roman World. It’s an outstanding early example (third century BC) of the pagan instinct to identify a supreme god who created and now manages the cosmos rationally, by means of his “word.” “In the Stoic sphere,” Bird says, “the Logos was the ubiquity of divine rationality that holds all things together” (131).
Mike Bird is one of the editors of the Studies in Early Christology series (Wipf & Stock), of which my book In the Form of a God: The Pre-existence of the Exalted Christ in Paul is the first published title. Mike is prodigiously productive but he found time to interview me about the book recently.
A couple of days after my Transfigured interview, Sam Tideman recorded a conversation with Mike Bird about his book Jesus among the gods: Early Christology in the Greco-Roman World. Mike does a really good job of painting in the neglected pagan religious background to the evolution of christology in the New Testament and the early church. I think Mike and I broadly agree that the richly detailed, restored pagan fresco is much more important for understanding the early response to the testimony to Jesus than has generally been appreciated. But we disagree, it appears, about the interpretation of 1 Corinthians 8:6.
I recently did an interview with Sam Tideman for his Transfigured YouTube channel. It’s also available as a podcast.
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