I’ve tried this sort of exercise before, but reading Magnus Zetterholm’s chapter in Paul Within Judaism: Restoring the First-Century Context to the Apostle has prompted me to have another go at schematising the relation between theology and history and the challenge that this presents to the church today. 

We start with the story of Israel. The New Testament is in some respects a climax to this story, but it also projects a narrative future in the language and imagery of Jewish apocalypticism. This narrated future, in my view, consists of judgment on first century Israel in the form of the Jewish War, the faithful witness of the churches in the Greek-Roman world, and the eventual overthrow of pagan Rome and the confession of Christ by the nations of the ancient world.

One of the most important questions driving current developments in our understanding of the New Testament—and therefore of what it means to be “Christian”—has to do with the relation between the early Jesus movement and Judaism. In practice this issue closely matches the hermeneutical question that I have tended to emphasise here: should our understanding of the New Testament be controlled by theology or by history? I have been reading Paul Within Judaism: Restoring the First Century Context to the Apostle, edited by Mark Nanos and Magnus Zetterholm. The book has prompted these reflections and will be used to plot and illustrate a trajectory that I think is of considerable importance for the narrative-historical argument.

Yesterday’s post about Simon Gathercole’s little book defending substitution as an integral part of Paul’s understanding of the atonement got a brief mention in a piece by James McGrath along with a post by Mike Bird on the same subject. Here I attempt to map the three positions represented by McGrath, Bird and me, grossly oversimplifying in all three cases—people are always more complicated than the positions that they sometimes appear to take.

McGrath blogs on the “Progressive Christian” channel at Patheos. He thinks that the doctrine of penal substitution is deeply “problematic as a contemporary theological viewpoint” and that this “is a matter that no amount of prooftexting can address”.

Bird blogs on the “Evangelical” channel at Patheos. In the post cited by McGrath he takes issue with a Missio Alliance article in which William Walker recommends a “debt forgiveness” model for the atonement against a penal substitionary or payment model. Bird defends the traditional position on theological and biblical grounds, citing texts which in his view demonstrate that the cross is “satisfaction”, “penal” and “substitutionary”.

Simon Gathercole is worried that the doctrine of substitutionary atonement is going out of fashion so he sets out to defend it in this brief book Defending Substitution: An Essay on Atonement in Paul. It’s a very limited argument: in two main exegetical chapters he considers two statements that Paul makes: Christ died “for our sins” (1 Cor. 15:3; and Christ died “for the ungodly… for us” (Rom. 5:6-8). I ended up unconvinced by his defence, but not quite for the reasons I expected. 

In the Introduction, Gathercole explains that he thinks substitution is important for both doctrinal and pastoral reasons. He provides a straightforward definition: “I am defining substitutionary atonement for the present purposes as Christ’s death in our place, instead of us” (15). He distinguishes between substitution and other atonement ideas: penalty, representation, propitiation, and satisfaction. Finally, he addresses a number of theological, philosophical and logical criticisms of the “doctrine of substitutionary atonement”, including Steve Chalke’s notorious claim that substitutionary atonement amounts to “cosmic child abuse”, which he dismisses as “extremely shallow”, and Christopher Hitchens’ fierce objection to vicarious redemption: “I cannot absolve you of your responsibilities. It would be immoral of me to offer, and immoral of you to accept” (27). But this is just the introduction to a small book whose focus is on exegesis, so don’t expect anything more than a passing appraisal.

I asserted a while back that there is no evidence in the Gospels that Jesus had anything to say, directly or indirectly, about homosexuality. I don’t think he threatened pederasts with drowning, or asked people if they had gone out into the wilderness to see a gay man in effeminate clothing, or included homosexuals in the category of eunuchs. In a comment, however, Peter Wilkinson drew attention to the argument, put forward here and elsewhere, that Jesus knowingly healed the centurion’s catamite, thus affirming their same-sex relationship (Lk. 7:1-10; Matt. 8:5-13). Is there any reason to think that this “honoured” slave served a sexual purpose? Again, probably not.

First, what do I mean by a “narrative-historical hermeneutic”? I mean a way of integrating the Bible into our self-understanding as the church—that is, a way of doing theology—that takes it to be the story told by a community about its historical existence over time, reaching back to the promises made to Abraham, and reaching forward—at least as I see it—to the confession of Christ as Lord by the nations of the Greek-Roman world.

That last part is too historical for most people and perhaps has to be regarded as optional for the time being. The point, though, is that our defining theology is to be constructed as a story about history that looks both backwards and forwards: it remembers what God has done in the past; it accounts for what God is doing in the present; and it imagines what God will do in the future from the perspective of the particular prophetic community.

There are two parts to the narrative-historical hermeneutic that I am trying to develop and promote on this site. I argue, first, that the Bible should be read as the complex but essentially coherent story that a people told about its historical experience over a long period of time; and as a corollary, that the “theological” content of the Bible is part of the telling of that story.

Then secondly, I suggest that the church today can and should learn to live, do and believe according to this historically grounded narrative and not according to the various reductionist theological schemata that have been superimposed on scripture throughout the ages. In my view, the hermeneutic not only gives us a much better understanding of the New Testament; it also gives us a powerful paradigm for reconceptualizing the identity and purpose of the church after Christendom.