In Acts Luke tells a story about the mission of the early church first to Israel, then to the nations. The risen Lord Jesus features prominently in this story both as the content of the church’s preaching and as one who is dynamically involved in the direction and oversight of that mission.

Nothing suggests, as far as I can see, that Luke thought this story depended on the premise that Jesus was God. It’s an invasive hypothesis. The remarkable status and role of Jesus in the story is fully accounted for by the claim—made principally on the basis of Psalm 110:1—that the God of Israel has exalted the “man” Jesus to his right hand and given him the authority and power to judge and rule over Israel and the nations that he would otherwise have reserved for himself.

Marc Taylor has taken issue with my argument that there is little scope for a “high christology” in Acts because the proclamation that Jesus is Lord is “accounted for almost entirely by reference to narratives found in the Psalms, in which Israel’s king is delivered by God and given authority to judge and rule over the nations”.

Marc contends, to the contrary, that there is a high christology in Acts and sets out a number of arguments to back up his claim. I think he fails for two basic reasons: i) he ignores the central kerygma about exaltation and lordship; and he gives insufficient attention to the context of the “proof texts” that he cites. Feel free to disagree.

The question is put to me from time to time: How does the modern state of Israel fit into your narrative-historical schema? Does Israel still have a covenantal right to the land? It’s come up in passing, but I don’t think I’ve addressed the matter directly. Donald Trump’s apparent support for Israel and the continued expansion of Jewish settlements on the West Bank reminds us that this is not a merely academic question.

My view is that from the Christian perspective the basic Old Testament storyline has been fulfilled—not in a transcendent manner, but in the more or less realistic historical terms that are everywhere presupposed in the prophetic visions.

There is a small number of texts in the New Testament that have been taken as evidence that in the earliest period Jesus was directly called “God”. John Tancock lists John 1:1; 20:28; Romans 9:5; Titus 2:13 and 2 Peter 1:1. I’ve discussed the two John passages and Romans 9:5 in other posts, though they go back a few years, and I can’t say for certain that I still agree with myself…

I suppose that one of the main oddities of my thorough-going narrative-historical reading of the New Testament, at least from a more or less orthodox evangelical perspective, is my contention that a significant part of its “eschatological” vision has in view the conversion of the nations of the Greek-Roman world as a matter of historical fact. I think, basically, that this is where the whole “kingdom of God” argument in scripture finally lands.

I have to be a bit careful in critiquing John Walton’s thesis in his book The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate, because, as has been pointed out to me, it’s only a summary of his much more substantial argument in his Genesis 1 As Ancient Cosmology. I’m not sure that really excuses the lack of concrete evidence in support of the argument in the shorter book, but it’s something to keep in mind.

If we are going to read the New Testament as historical narrative, we have to have some sense of historical context. The church, on the whole, is not interested in historical context. The Bible is mostly treated as a self-contained, self-sufficient sacred text. In a recent comment Travis Finley wrote: “My hermeneutic ultimately depends upon a primacy of the uniformity of scripture; that is, the reader ought to be able to interpret the meaning of the text from the primary text itself, rather than extra-biblical.”

That perhaps suggests a high view of scripture, but it is also going to be, more often than not, a protectionist strategy. We are afraid that if we make scripture transparent to its literary-historical environment, our cherished interpretations of it—whether traditional or idiosyncratic—will be put at risk.