Paul asked me what I thought of his essay “The Biggest Fallacies About Religion and Politics” on Daily Kos. Paul, I think it’s a great essay, well worth reading. I agree with the general thesis that “Christianity” (for want of a better word) is always “political” (for want of a better word). But allow me to pick at some of the details, as someone who is neither a political theologian nor a commentator on current affairs.

I ended my last post agreeing in principle with Ian Paul that preachers need to take the historical dynamics of the biblical narrative seriously, but disagreeing over the scope of that contention. It is not history only insofar as it sets up the conditions for the existence and mission of the church that matters—the process by which grace is extended to gentiles, for example.

Following on from the piece on Tucker Ferda’s attempt to disconnect the coming of the Son of Man from the war against Rome, I happened to come across Ian Paul’s post this week about the second coming (“or something else?”) in Luke 21. He covers a fair bit of ground, but I want to focus on his contention that the “coming” of the Son of Man “in a cloud with power and great glory” is “actually about the Ascension and the proclamation of the gospel to the nations.” Paul is often very persuasive on these matters, but that surprised me.

I made some general comments on the relation of the coming of the Son of Man motif to historical events in my previous post on Tucker Ferda’s book Jesus and His Promised Second Coming: Jewish Eschatology and Christian Origins. I really don’t think he’s right to disconnect the disorder in the heavens and the seeing of the Son of Man coming in clouds from the prediction of war and of the destruction of the temple. Here, I work through his more detailed arguments in the “Messiah and Temple” section.

In an excellent interview on the Protestant Libertarian Podcast about his book Jesus and His Promised Second Coming: Jewish Eschatology and Christian Origins (2024), Tucker Ferda uses the expression “process eschatology” to register the fact that in Jewish apocalyptic writings the “end” is generally conceived not as a single event but as a series of events.

I said I would come back to Matthew Thiessen’s “incoherent” account of Paul’s eschatology, so here we are. Chapter four of A Jewish Paul: The Messiah’s Herald to the Gentiles is about Paul the “End-Time Jew.” Thiessen begins: “Paul never wrote an autobiography. Why would he when he expected an imminent end to the current structure of the cosmos?” (49).

I asked ChatGPT (Chat with Website) to summarise the “narrative-historical” approach to biblical interpretation that I pursue on this website. This is what it came up with. It’s not quite how I would have put it. I wouldn’t have said “empires like Rome,” for example; “historical context” is rather vaguely conceived; and I would probably have emphasised the eschatological outlook of Jesus and the apostles. But it gets the main points right, and it was smart to pick up the post-Christendom orientation. I especially like the concluding paragraph.