The Church of England has been rather taken aback by the refusal of leading cinemas in the UK to screen a video of people, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, reciting the Lord’s Prayer in the run-up to Christmas. The short film, which I find rather moving in its hurried way, is part of a campaign to encourage your average man-or-woman-in-the-cinema to pray.

In a comment on an old post looking at a review by Larry Hurtado of Dunn’s Did the First Christians Worship Jesus, Marc Taylor maintains that “Dunn’s assertion that certain prayer words are not used in reference to the Lord Jesus is without merit.” He lists four passages in Acts and a handful from Paul and James in support of his claim. The debate is an interesting one. Here I want briefly to review the Acts texts and propose a different model to account for the data.

Bruce Chilton starts his book Pure Kingdom: Jesus’ Vision of God by noting that at the end of the nineteenth century Albert Schweitzer had come to the realisation that the “kingdom of God” was basically “eschatological”. He had seen the connection between Jesus’ teaching and the literature of early Judaism and had concluded that Jesus must have been talking about the “violent end of the world”—a “cataclysm on a cosmic scale”.

This eschatological interpretation, grounded in a Jewish worldview, was very different from the two prevailing theological understandings of the kingdom of God: on the one hand, that the “kingdom of God” was a reference to an individual’s life after death”; on the other, that it was a “movement of social improvement on earth”.

What does Jesus mean when he teaches his disciples to pray “lead us not into temptation”? In a brief appendix (“Jesus’ Prayer and the War of Worlds”) to his book Pure Kingdom: Jesus’ Vision of God Bruce Chilton aims to define a middle ground between two misunderstandings of the petition. On the one side, there is the popular devotional view, according to which “temptation” means “enticement”: we are to ask God to “keep us from wicked impulses”. On the other side, there is the “scholarly view” that Jesus taught his disciples to pray that they would escape the apocalyptic “testing” or “trial” that would come upon them at the end of the world, which was just around the corner.

The National Secular Society has taken Tom Wright to task for advocating a “cruciform theocracy” that would overcome the prevailing separation of religion and politics in the West. A more detailed summary of Wright’s talk at St Paul’s Cathedral in London a week ago can be found on the Christian Today website, from which I have gleaned the main bullet points of his argument…

As an addendum to the previous post contrasting two accounts of resurrection here’s a set of diagrams illustrating three ways of thinking about the relationship between the resurrection of Jesus and subsequent resurrections. The first is the conventional modern evangelical view that can’t see beyond the salvation or damnation of the lost. The second is a revised evangelical view that has assimilated something of the Jewish-narrative shape of biblical thought. Then, thirdly, there’s what I see as a more consistent reconstruction of the Jewish-apocalyptic narrative of the New Testament.