What I rather grandly call the narrative-historical method works on the assumption that the Bible is essentially a story told by a people about its historical experience and should be read from that perspective. The historical existence of this people was not merely religious or spiritual; it was political, it was shaped by political events. The Bible tells the story of the troubled and troublesome presence of this people in the midst of powerful and at times hostile nations over a long period of time. For this reason I argue that the central and guiding theological argument is not the one about incarnation and redemption but the one about kingdom, which culminates in the expectation that the God of Israel would eventually come to rule over the nations of the ancient world—in practice over the nations controlled by Rome. The New Testament story about Jesus tells us how this goal would be achieved.

With all due respect to those who think that Jesus was a kindly, loving, unworldly pacifist who rose above the Old Testament logic of sin and violence, I think that this is a serious misreading of the Gospels. The “historical” Jesus—by which I mean the Jesus who makes sense in the context of first century Israel—was not less than an apocalyptic prophet sent by YHWH to Israel to call the Jews to repentance in light of coming catastrophic divine judgment in the form of war and the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple. He was more than that, but he was not less than that.

I need to keep this brief, so I will focus on the climax to the series of “woes” that Jesus pronounces against the scribes and Pharisees in Matthew 23.

I suggested in a recent post that the biblical “kingdom” paradigm was put in place when the people of Israel asked Samuel to appoint a king because they needed someone 1) to judge them and 2) to lead them out against their enemies (1 Sam. 8:20). Theologically, therefore, “kingdom” is YHWH dealing with 1) the internal integrity and 2) the external security of his people throughout history, both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament.

This claim has been questioned on the grounds that the incident constituted, in fact, the repudiation of God as king: “they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them” (1 Sam. 8:7). The Old Testament paradigm was a mistake from the start, so we cannot think of kingdom in the New Testament as a continuation of kingdom in the Old Testament. In his comment Peter argues that Jesus introduced something completely new. “The one was a kingdom of empire and violence, the other of servanthood and love.”

Earlier in the week I was in Billingham on Teesside where I gave a talk on narrative-historical theology to the super Galilee Network and friends. In a typically overloaded (when will I learn?) introduction I used this image—one which I have used before on this blog—to make the point that what we are dealing with essentially is the story of the historical community of God’s people:

I said that the community is best thought of as a “priestly people” called to serve the interests of the creator God in the world under changing internal and external conditions, riding the roller coaster of history (cf. Exod. 19:5-6; Is. 61:5-6; 1 Pet. 2:4-6). What scripture gives us is the story that this community told about itself—how it interpreted its experiences—in a formative period.

Jerel Kratt has been making a vigorous case against my suggestion that Isaiah 60-66 describes an enhanced but essentially historical future for Israel that was not fulfilled, either in the decades after the return from exile or in the events narrated in the New Testament.

He thinks that Isaiah was not talking about a new Jerusalem on earth but a new Jerusalem in heaven. I don’t see anything in the text to support that contention.

In “21 reasons why the coming of the kingdom of God was not the end of the world” I stated that “There is no new creation in the Old Testament…, only kingdom.” There are, however, two explicit references to new creation in the Old Testament, both in the third part of Isaiah: “For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth”, and “as the new heavens and the new earth that I make shall remain before me” (Is. 65:17; 66:22). Have I got it wrong, then?

I recently took part in a recorded conversation with Matt Hartke for Justin Brierley’s Unbelievable? programme on Premier Christian Radio. It will be broadcast and made available on podcast some time in the next few weeks, I believe.

Matt has been on a long journey of faith and theology. You can read his story on his Fifth Act Theology blog. He set out from the bondage of a rigid futurist eschatology a while back, and after a sojourn in sunny Caird-Wright-land, which he documents very well on his blog, he has now ended up in bleak agnostic exile. That’s disappointing because I’m inclined to think that the historical method of Caird and Wright, or something like it, is the best hope that the church has for maintaining the relevance of the Jesus-story after Christendom.