I don’t think that the “kingdom of God” is half as complicated or mysterious as people sometimes make it out to be. In the Synoptic Gospels, it has in view a future moment in time when Israel’s God will intervene in the history of his people to put things right—to punish sin, to defeat enemies, to restore faithfulness—and to establish a new government.

The idea is everywhere in the Old Testament prophets, but a simple example is the proclamation of good news to the ruins of Jerusalem that “Your God reigns”—or as the Targum puts it, “The kingdom of your God has been revealed.” YHWH is about to act decisively in the eyes of the nations to liberate his people from captivity, bring them back to the land, and restore the fortunes of the city (Is. 52:7-12).

This post is a response to some questions put to me by a young Christian who is exploring his faith, as he puts it. He writes: “I’ve been absorbed in your blog for the past couple of hours as I haven’t seen anything like it. It’s very different, and I’m sure you can sympathize with any feelings of disorientation I have!” I’m quite pleased with that. Disorientation in not much more than two hours!

He’s certainly grasped the basic argument about Jesus’ saving death in that short time, and he wants to push back in a couple of places.

Pete Enns has an excellent Bible for Normal People podcast on Romans in which he “shares 10 things essential to understanding the book of Romans.” I wrote about this last year, but since Geoff Leslie asked about it, here’s a brief rerun.

Enns’ emphasis on the importance of groups gives a better account of the letter than Andrew Errington’s tweeted synopsis, which reads the text, in time-honoured fashion, as a treatise (or “tweet-ise”) on personal salvation and life under grace (except that, by some unexplained logic, in the end all Israel will be saved).

The first thing to say about David Bentley Hart’s book, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, & Universal Salvation is that it takes as its point of departure the “Question of an Eternal Hell”. Immediately here, I think, we have the trouble with universalism. It has been devised as a solution to a theological problem, not a biblical problem.

I’m impressed by Andrew Errington’s lively tweeted summary of the argument of Romans—so impressed, in fact, that I thought I’d try a narrative-historical version. It’s an excellent little exercise, given the complexity of the letter. It’s crucial for good interpretation to have a sense of the whole. And, of course, of the historical context.

I’ve put the two side-by-side here to highlight the differences of emphasis. Errington’s approach is more conventionally evangelical. He reads Romans as a treatise on the theme of salvation or justification on the basis of grace rather than of works.

Here I want to try and answer some questions sent to me by someone who grew up in the “reformed, fundamental, SBC” tradition but has spent the best part of the last year deconstructing his faith “down to nothing.” He has been reading the work of historically-minded interpreters like Pete Enns and NT Wright, but has been having a hard time finding a way forward. His faith is sinking. “I currently don’t see any reason to be a Christian or to continue in the Christian way.”

My initial response was that the faith questions are much harder to answer than the historical-exegetical questions, and—goodness knows!—the historical-exegetical questions are hard enough. But interpretation is a major part of the problem, and I think it is important to recognise that it has implications for faith, both positively and negatively.

Certain core emphases or tenets have emerged over the years as I have dug myself deeper and deeper into the pit of the narrative-historical perspective:

1. The key to understanding the Bible is history, not theology.
2. What holds the whole thing together is the historical existence of a people that tells a story about itself and its relation to the creator God over long periods of time; and in a sense we are still telling that story.
3. The “message” of the New Testament is as Jewish as the message of the Old Testament….