This piece by Andrew Bunt on the Think Theology site caught my eye. He takes issue with the now rather commonplace view that the Bible is basically a story, running from creation to new creation, and asks whether perhaps “the Bible is better understood as poetry.” His brief analysis is based on a TheoEd talk by Brent Strawn, who is an Old Testament scholar. There is some point to the critique of the Bible-as-story hermeneutic, but I would suggest that neither Strawn nor Bunt have come up with the right solution.

There is an argument that when the Synoptic Gospels speak of Jesus coming to Israel, we must imagine him making a journey from heaven to earth to fulfil God’s purposes.

The demons ask Jesus, “Have you come here to destroy us?” (Mk. 1:24 par. Lk. 4:34; Matt. 8:29). Jesus says that he has come to preach the gospel (Mk. 1:38; cf. Lk. 4:43), not to call the righteous but sinners (Mk. 2:17 par. Matt. 9:13; Lk. 5:32), not to abolish the Law and the prophets but to fulfil them (Matt. 5:17), to cast fire on the land (Lk. 12:49), not to bring peace but a sword (Matt. 10:34 par. Lk. 12:51), not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many (Mk. 10:45 par. Matt. 20:28), and to seek and save the lost (Lk. 19:10).

The last post on (re-)defining the kingdom of God in nine words elicited a couple of fair and well articulated objections to the narrative-historical approach on Facebook. I was invited to respond. The basic complaint, I think, is that the method is reductionist, leaving the church with too little to work with today. My response in a nutshell is that 1) in certain respects, yes, it is too reductionist; 2) in other respects the reductionism is necessary; and 3) the church needs to find new ways of working with the historically reduced narrative of the New Testament. Now in a bit more detail….

I know this has been a recurring theme here, but a concise statement about the kingdom of God on the Gospel Coalition site gives me another opportunity to stress the importance of a fundamental biblical-theological distinction, one that I have been making here for the last ten years and more.

It’s like watching your kid on the merry-go-round, yelling at him each time he spins past: “That’s not the right way to sit on a horse! You’re going in the wrong direction! How many times do I have to tell you?” Actually, it’s probably more like shouting at someone else’s kid.

It is sometimes argued that when Jesus laments over Jerusalem, saying, “How often I wanted to gather your children…” (Matt. 23:37), we should understand this as an assertion of his involvement “in the entire duration of Israel’s history.” In Simon Gathercole’s words, Jesus is portrayed in Matthew’s Gospel “as a transcendent figure who has been summoning Israel to repentance throughout her history.”

In the previous post I put forward my reasons for doubting Michael Bird’s claim, in his anti-adoptionist polemic Jesus the Eternal Son, that Mark identifies Jesus as the “Lord” whose way is prepared by John the Baptist. Bird offers a number of further arguments in his chapter on “The Gospel of Mark and the Son of God” in defence of the thesis that “Mark portrays Jesus as a pre-existent figure with transcendent qualities who (ambiguously!) shares in the identity of Israel’s kyrios” (106). I summarise the arguments and set out my reasons for remaining unpersuaded.

Adoptionism, Michael Bird tells us in his book Jesus the Eternal Son: Answering Adoptionist Christology, was one of the “most potent if not persistent heresies of the second and third centuries”. It came in several unpalatable varieties, but common to all was the view 1) that “divine sonship was not essential to Jesus”, and 2) that “divine sonship is not ontological but honorific” (7).