Re: Being a disciple of Jesus is not enough

Interesting comments.

It seems to me that a determined argument for coherence entails at least implicitly the recognition that the texts are ostensibly and perhaps really ‘incoherent’. I referred in my preceding comment to a story or stories.

I think the search for coherence, however, is not unwarranted and is arguably required by the centrality given to Jesus. What I am asking is how does he make sense of Israel’s story in the light of his vocation and the concrete historical circumstances that he faced. There are, of course, many ways to read the Gospel narratives, but this at least narrows the focus somewhat. If we assume that he was a real historical figure and if we accept that the New Testament provides us with a more or less reliable account of his significance, then there is every reason to think that he held a rather well defined and coherent view of what YHWH was doing through him for the sake of Israel.

In a sense, Jesus was ‘trapped’ in a particular reading of the scriptures, a particular understanding of the mind of God, a particular interpretation of the signs of the times. I would argue, indeed, that Jesus’ self-understanding and vocation remains highly restrictive in its application for the early church until the oppressor of the people of God, namely Rome, is defeated: the disciples are included in the particular story of the Son of man. This was not a time for reader-response theory.

But I would also say that with the idea of being new creation comes a whole set of new creative possibilities. I rather think that it is through the interplay between the coherent historical narrative and the fecund prophetic imagination that the church will rediscover its identity and vocation following the collapse of the Christendom paradigm.

We are both reacting against the reductionist modernist paradigm. You resist it by opening up the possibilities for meaning and interpretation, by advocating incoherence and a plurality of readings - which, ironically, is basically what we have always had in the Protestant tradition. I am more inclined to find the solution to the problem in an alternative narrative-historical hermeneutic, because I think that is the best way to preserve the ‘evangelical’ power of the narrative for mission and worship and community. But it may be that there is the potential for a rather powerful collaboration between those two approaches once they have been properly understood.