Someone asked me yesterday whether “tongues as of fire” (Acts 2:3) points to the fact that the disciples were to proclaim that the kingdom of God was coming, meaning judgment on unbelieving Israel and the nations. I was at the Patriarchal Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist in Tolleshunt Knights on Sunday, and since proceedings were mostly in Greek, I missed any reference to the church calendar. In the afternoon Father Melchizedek gave an elegant homily in English looking at the events of Acts 2, but I’ve been slow to register the fact that we’ve just celebrated Pentecost. No wonder people are asking if the UK is still a Christian country.

Luke’s account of events in Acts 2 is a good example of how the biblical narrative often constrains our modern theologies. We think that this is all about the church as we know it. It’s not. The pneumatology of Pentecost has to work within narrow historical boundaries. As is noted in the question, it has to do with Israel and judgment. I’m not so sure about the nations.

Like a lot of people who promote the doctrine of hell as a place of eternal suffering, J.D. Greear insists, in “7 Truths About Hell” on the Gospel Coalition site, that he would happily erase the belief from Christian teaching if he could, but he can’t because it’s in the Bible, so we have to live with it. Besides, it is his view that we can’t fully understand God and his world unless we come to terms with the doctrine. To that end he sets out “seven truths” that he thinks should frame our discussion of the topic.

The problem is that the fact of hell is merely taken for granted—we are asked to take C.S. Lewis’ word for it. You would have thought that a set of seven framing truths would have a demonstrable biblical or theological relationship to the doctrine that supposedly sits in the middle of them. But they don’t. They are arbitrary and incoherent; they don’t appear to frame anything in particular; and where scripture does come into the picture, it is speaking about something other than hell as popularly understood.

Samuel had judged Israel all the days of his life, doing the circuit from Bethel to Gilgal to Mizpah to Ramah. In his old age he appointed his two sons as judges over Israel, but as is sometimes the case with public officials, they turned out to be corrupt: “They took bribes and perverted justice” (1 Sam. 7:15-8:3). So the elders of Israel came to Samuel and demanded that he appoint a king in place of his worthless sons. Samuel was reluctant to do so, but God made it very clear that he was to give them what they wanted.

This is the point at which the story about the kingdom of God begins in scripture. The episode gives us two of the three main components of the concept. It also teaches us that the kingdom of God is not a spiritual or theological or, for that matter, cosmic abstraction—it belongs to the narrated historical experience of the biblical community.

There are two incidents in Mark’s Gospel where Jesus demonstrates mastery over the sea. In one he calms a storm with a word of rebuke (Mk. 4:35-41); in the other he walks on the water as the disciples struggle to cross the Sea of Galilee at night, seemingly with the intention of passing by them (Mk. 6:45-52). In recent debates over Jesus’ “divine identity” both these stories have been interpreted as evidence that Mark intended his readers to discern an identification between Jesus and the God of Israel. It is YHWH who stills the storm when scattered Israel cries out to him in distress, so that his people may reach their “desired haven” (Ps. 107:29-30). It is YHWH who “alone stretched out the sky and walks on the sea as on dry ground” (Job 9:8 LXX). If it is now Jesus who does these things, then Jesus must be God.