I was pointed to G.B. Caird’s Ethel M. Wood Lecture “Jesus and the Jewish Nation” last week. The lecture was delivered in 1965 and published by The Athlone Press. It can be downloaded from Rob Bradshaw’s BiblicalStudies.org.uk.

I tend to trace my understanding of Jesus’ eschatology back to Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God, which was published in 1996. But Caird’s lecture gives us a brilliant, vivid, precise and very accessible sketch of the reading, in much the same language, from thirty years earlier. Wright acknowledges the influence of Caird—“it was his little book Jesus and the Jewish Nation that provided the clue to a fresh line of thought” (JVG xix). But still, you have to wonder why it has taken us so long.

Tim Challies has produced a helpful diagram to explain the differences between the three most prominent views of the end times—premillennialism, postmillennialism and amillennialism.

I say “helpful”, but “unhelpful” might be a better word for it, for at least three reasons.

First, this sort of presentation perpetuates the idea that New Testament eschatology is a puzzle for the church to solve, a collection of riddles to be decoded. Solutions to the puzzle have no credible relation to the real historical future of the church—the future as we now see it—and are, therefore, only of hypothetical and esoteric interest.

This may be getting much too speculative for most people’s taste, but I’ll have a go….

It’s basically another attempt to talk about biblical narrative, missional context, and same-sex sexual relations all in the same breath, with an overblown chart thrown in for good measure.

The bit that I’m especially interested in is point 4 on the chart. What does the church in the West represent or stand for or embody ethically in relation to the secular-humanist matrix in which it is situated? I will argue, tentatively, that the church should be a benchmark not of ideals that belonged to the biblical period (though these ideals are not forgotten) but of secular humanism’s own best ethical standards.

The furore surrounding the Nashville Statement may have come and gone, but I have been in a lot of discussions about the missional implications of the LGBT “problem” recently and I feel I ought to make a belated stab at an appraisal.

The Statement is not well written and ambiguous at critical points. It fails to explain its terminology. It makes no attempt to present the biblical, theological, or scientific reasoning behind the terse affirmations and denials. It gains theological focus at the expense of pastoral sensitivity, to put it mildly. It reduces the complex, shifting boundary conditions of human sexuality to a crude moral binary. Taken at face value, it is divisive. The tone is authoritarian, self-important and archaic. The whole idea of signing a statement of this sort seems to me vain and rather pointless.

Who was/is Jesus? If we read the New Testament as historical narrative—rather than through later theological grids—the dominant story by a country mile is the one about the man who was marked out at birth, and by his birth, as Israel’s future saviour and king, who was chosen and anointed by Israel’s God to bring a powerful end-of-the-age message to Israel regarding the coming decisive intervention of God in the affairs of his people for better and for worse, who was fiercely opposed by the political-religious establishment in Jerusalem and put to death, who was raised from the dead, who was given supreme authority to rule as Israel’s king in the midst of his enemies throughout the coming ages, and who was eventually to be confessed as Lord by the nations of the Greek-Roman world.

The Notting Hill Carnival kicks off today, so there is no church this morning. The whole of Westbourne Grove has been fenced off, boarded up, covered with tarpaulins. Large numbers of decent people have evacuated the area. You’d think Hurricane Harvey was about to hit west London. But it has given me the opportunity to reflect, in a lazy Sunday morning fashion, on the narrative-historical method—what it is and why we need it.

What it means to call Jesus “Lord” has been a big bone of contention over the last decade or so. I have had a lot to say on the matter here, there, etc., and on Facebook recently. Many people are convinced by a syllogistic Trinitarian logic: YHWH = Lord, Jesus = Lord, therefore Jesus = YHWH. Others, myself included, think that Jesus is confessed as “Lord” because the authority entailed in lordship has been graciously bestowed upon him by God (cf. Phil. 2:9-11).

This latter ante-Trinitarian line of thought can be made to serve different theological agendas. My own view is that it is not an argument against Trinitarianism (that is, anti-Trinitarian). It is an argument for a narrative-historical reading of the New Testament that foregrounds the kingdom-political significance of Jesus in the first century context. This is not the whole story, but it is by far the most important narrative thread in the New Testament, running from the announcement to Mary that her son would receive the “throne of his father David” (Lk. 1:32) through to the fall of Babylon the great in Revelation 18-19. I think it needs to be better understood—at the expense of the classic Trinitarian paradigm if necessary.