Does the new book really say that the NT has no application
to
us today?

Graham Old (Leaving
Münster) asked this
question in response to some remarks that Peter
Wilkinson made about my book Re:
Mission: Biblical Mission for a Post-Biblical Church.
Rather than address the question under the original book announcement I
thought it better to start a new thread. It is the perennial problem of
historical readings of the New Testament that they tend to distance the
narrative from the reader today. We are accustomed to thinking that the
gospel has direct personal relevance to us and to all humanity and we
struggle to see how this can be the case if key categories such as
‘judgment’, ‘salvation’ and ‘forgiveness’ are to be historically
contextualized. The issue under consideration here is not the
whole of the New Testament but the particular question of what it means
to say that ‘Christ died for our sins in accordance with the
scriptures’ (1 Cor. 15:3). This continues the discussion from ‘The death of Jesus in the Gospels’
and ‘The death of Jesus in Paul’.

The first and most important question we face in asking about the meaning of Jesus’ death in Paul is: What sort of thing are we looking for? This is necessarily a highly abbreviated analysis, but I think that what we need to find is not the right explanatory theory to superimpose on top of Paul’s various arguments and metaphors (substitutionary atonement, Christus Victor, moral influence, etc.) but the eschatological narrative that lies underneath them. The mistake that is typically made is to isolate the cross from the narrative context and transmute it into a singular metaphysical event that can in principle be formulated in terms of a theory of the atonement. This is not necessarily an illegitimate procedure, but problems arise when these theological constructs are turned round and used as interpretive grids for the reading of scripture.

i did a site search on the teaching often referred to as universal restoration or universal redemption - and found zip.

after 25 years as a christian - on both the inside and the outside of the organised evangelical church - i now find myself looking closely at this teaching and feeling quietly excited and liberated by it.