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).

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.