I have a few loosely related comments to make about an article on the Christianity Today site by the missiologist Ed Stetzer: “Headwinds in Evangelism: New Challenges Secularism and Pluralism Add to Outreach.”

1. Having watched the new Attenborough documentary Climate Change: The Facts and Franny Armstrong’s The Age of Stupid last night, and with London’s streets currently blocked by Extinction Rebellion protesters, who are now threatening to shut down Heathrow Airport over the Easter weekend, I don’t think Christians should be too blasé about telling their flying-around-America stories. The actress Emma Thompson was criticised for flying back from Los Angeles to join in the demonstration. A spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion said in her defence that her flight was an “unfortunate cost in our bigger battle to save the planet”. Can high profile Christian leaders even claim that much?

I taught a class, as part of a King’s School of Theology course over the weekend, on Jesus and the story of Israel. My starting point was to say that we have two basic ways of telling the story about Jesus. There is a vertical-theological story about the eternal Son who is incarnated in the middle of time, who dies for the sins of the world, and who returns to resume his place in the godhead for the rest of eternity. There is also a horizontal-historical story about Jesus. In this story he is the beloved Son sent to the mismanaged vineyard of Israel, whose death at the hands of the Jewish authorities in Jerusalem opens up a difficult, narrow and hazardous path for the few who are prepared to follow him, and whose resurrection vouches for the continued existence of God’s people in the age to come.

Donald Hagner’s book How New is the New Testament? First Century Judaism and the Emergence of Christianity is coming to epitomise, in my view, evangelicalism’s sad failure of nerve when it comes to the interpretation of the New Testament’s outlook on the future. As a historian Hagner is fully aware of the “national-political” dimension to the story about Jesus as it is told in the Synoptic Gospels. But as an evangelical he feels obliged to divert interpretation in the direction of traditional eschatological scenarios. His treatment of Peter’s sermon in Solomon’s Portico, following the healing of the lame man in the name of the crucified Jesus, exhibits the same flaws as his attempt to frame the disciples’ question about the restoration of the kingdom to Israel in Acts 1:6 (56-57).

In a section in his chapter on Luke in his book How New is the New Testament?, Hagner sets out an “interpretive dilemma” (41-45). He has gone through the opening chapters of Luke and noted that we find in the infancy stories both “strong motifs of continuity with the language of the OT and Second Temple Judaism” and a radical discontinuity caused by the announcement of the fulfilment of these promises in the birth of Jesus.

He then notes a “puzzling aspect to much of the material exhibiting this continuity”. A good part of it has to do with promises of a “specifically national-political kind, pertaining to the nation Israel per se”. Hagner asks: “In what sense are these expectations truly fulfilled in the coming of Christ?”

Sitting by a pool in Phnom Penh I’ve just picked up Donald Hagner’s book How New is the New Testament? I find much of his work very useful, but I’m expecting to end up some way further in the direction of “the New Testament is not new” than he is. We’ll see.

The opening paragraph sets the scene effectively, but it immediately raises a number of questions, which I will mention briefly:

Among the several paradigm-shifting changes in NT scholarship over the past century, none is more important than the new positive emphasis on Judaism as a religion of grace—a change that has begun to erase the common perception of Judaism as the antithesis of Christianity. Rather than having opposing theologies, Jews and Christians are now increasing perceived as members of the same family of faith, albeit different branches.

The Jesus of the Gospels is not the Jesus of our modern theologies, including proudly Jesus-centred, modern evangelicalism. This saying about the righteous shining like the sun in the kingdom of the Father could, I suppose, be adapted without too much difficulty to a mainstream evangelical message—as a way of speaking about the redeemed in heaven perhaps. But only if we ignore the context. The first century Jesus, who knew the scriptures and who spoke the language of Jewish apocalypticism, did not have in mind “saved” non-Jewish people basking in the glory of God in heaven when he said this. But this is the only Jesus known to us, so it’s about time evangelicals worked out what to do with him.

At the end of the age, Jesus says, the Son of Man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom “all stumbling blocks and those doing lawlessness” (my translation) and throw them into the furnace, where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Then “the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father” (Matt. 13:41-43).