I made the comment in part 1 of this review of Steve Chalke’s The Lost Message of Paul that he has worked hard to integrate recent New Testament scholarship into his analysis of Paul but that in the end his personal judgment as a post-evangelical pastor gets the better of him. That started me thinking about a little schematisation of the different standpoints from which we interpret the New Testament and of the different hermeneutical journeys that we are on. Then I’ll get back to the details of his attempt to rescue the lost message of Paul.

Ich habe bisher nur eine Person gehört – ein junger New Yorker, der im Fernsehen interviewt wurde –, die das Wort “apokalyptisch” im Zusammenhang mit der COVID-19-Pandemie verwendet. Ich denke, dass wir in der Regel sehr pragmatisch vorgehen. Aber es ist noch zu früh, und in dem Maße, wie die Zahl der Todesopfer steigt und die wirtschaftlichen und sozialen Auswirkungen zu greifen beginnen, werden wir vielleicht anfangen, die ganze Sache etwas weniger optimistisch zu sehen. Tatsache ist, dass wir außergewöhnliche Maßnahmen ergreifen müssen, um mit einer außergewöhnlichen globalen Krise fertig zu werden.

Steve Chalke is a British “Baptist minister, author, speaker, justice campaigner, broadcaster, social entrepreneur and former UN Special Advisor on Human Trafficking”, and the founder of the Oasis Trust. The Lost Message of Paul is his belated sequel to The Lost Message of Jesus, which he wrote with Alan Mann and published in 2004.

The earlier book got him into hot water with conservatives and evangelicals, not least because of its characterisation of the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement as “a form of cosmic child abuse”. This one is less controversial. Remarkably, he refrains from commenting on Paul’s views on same-sex relationships, apart from a brief swipe at churches that still impose boundary markers: “It is about regular attendance, being at mass, or confession, or about being christened, or not being divorced or a practising gay or gender non-binary or….”

I’ve heard only one person so far—a young New Yorker, interviewed on TV—use the word “apocalyptic” in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic. Mostly, I guess, we are being very pragmatic about it. But it’s early days, and as the fatalities mount and the economic and social impact begins to bite, we may begin to feel rather less sanguine about the whole thing. The fact is that we are having to take extraordinary measures to deal with an extraordinary global crisis.

“Apocalyptic” anyone?

In his book How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee, Bart Ehrman argues that in Galatians 4:14 Paul in effect speaks of Jesus as an angel:

You know that because of a weakness of the flesh I first proclaimed the good news to you, and you did not despise or spit out your trial in my flesh, but as (all’ hōs) an angel of God you received me, as (hōs) Christ Jesus.

Ehrman says that like most readers he always took this to mean that “the Galatians had received Paul in his infirm state the way they would have received an angelic visitor, or even Christ Jesus.” But he now agrees with Grieschen that the meaning is that “they received him as they would an angel, such as Christ”.

Alastair Roberts asks, “Where is the Trinity in the Old Testament?” He is quite candid about the fact that the “philosophical cast and categories of these later disputes transposed the biblical material into very different idioms and discourses animated by rather different concerns”; and he warns against the danger of “retrojecting a developed philosophical doctrine of the Trinity into texts operating within a very different horizon”.

But he thinks that there is at least a conceptual preparation for the idea of a pre-existent divine Christ in a figure such as the “angel of the Lord”, and he lists a number of New Testament passages which suggest, in his view, that when Christ finally appears, “he comes as a silhouetted figure who has been active in salvation and judgment throughout Israel’s history, finally stepping into the light.” Eloquently said, but unconvincing in my view. Let’s go through the list.

James Mercer is on the ministry team of the Benefice of St Aldhelm in Purbeck on the south coast of England. I’ve known him for some years, and we’ve had a few good conversations about the practical application of the narrative-historical method. He posted this bold, inspiring and beautifully written narrative as a comment, but I think it deserves greater prominence.

In the process of negotiating a Mission Action Plan with the seven churches in our Purbeck Benefice, this (provisonally) is the story we think we are attempting to tell.