Chapter two of Jesus and Divine Christology is about the “epiphany miracles.” Brant Pitre states the main purpose of the chapter quite bluntly: it is to “demolish the modern scholarly myth… that Jesus is not depicted as divine in the Synoptic Gospels” (40).

There are three such miracles: the stilling of the storm, the walking on the sea, and the transfiguration. It is Pitre’s view that

I have just started reading Brant Pitre’s Jesus and Divine Christology (2024), in which he sets out to show that the earliest Jewish followers of Jesus believed he was divine because “Jesus himself spoke and acted as if he were divine during his lifetime”—only he did so in a very Jewish way, “using riddles, questions, and allusions to Jewish Scriptures to both reveal and conceal the apocalyptic secret of his divinity” (12, italics removed). So a “divine messianic secret” sort of thing.

According to Douglas Moo, the theological or conceptual “framework within which Paul expresses his key ideas in Romans can be called salvation history” (D. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, 1996, 25). What he means by this is that “God has accomplished redemption as part of a historical process. God’s work in Christ is the center of history, the point from which both past and future must be understood” (26). So the cross and resurrection of Jesus are, on the one hand, the fulfilment of the Old Testament, and on the other, they anticipate the “final glory”.

I have been reading Tom Wright’s Into the Heart of Romans: A Deep Dive Into Paul’s Greatest Letter (2023), wondering whether I should make it recommended reading for a course on Romans. I probably will but with caveats.

My view is that Wright’s assessment of the traditional Protestant reading as narrowly individualistic is correct but he overshoots the heart of Paul’s thought when he says that Romans is about God’s plan to restore creation.

Nothing much to see here, just a footnote to my argument about Jesus being “in the form of a god,” but some people may find it interesting.

From my limited perspective (other limited perspectives are available), it appears that the church in the West is changing or being changed quite dramatically. It is adapting to a marginalised and diminished presence by re-imagining the manner of its engagement with the world around it. We are concerned less with the quantity of church community than with its quality. Boundaries have become more porous. There is more going out than coming in. We have rediscovered a preference for the poor and dysfunctional, in their various guises.