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.

I have no problem with Trinitarian orthodoxy as the product of a post-biblical, post-Jewish, post-apocalyptic rethinking of the relationship between Father, Son and Spirit, in the context of the construction of a new worldview for the Greek-Roman oikoumenē. I think that was probably, like Christendom itself, a natural and necessary development.

A narrative-historical approach, however, pushes back against the worldview-defining dominance of Trinitarian orthodoxy at two points.