history

(This was originally a comment attached to the ‘Why the historical Jesus matters’ post.)

The question of whether by historically contextualizing the Gospel story we make Jesus largely irrelevant to the church and the world today has been a recurrent one - indeed, for me something of a thorn in the flesh. It was recently posed rather articulately and forcefully by samlcarr and shiert on the ‘New creation and the kingdom of God’ thread. I realize that I appear to belabour the point far too much, and the impression is easily given that I think that Jesus is of no more than antiquarian interest to us today. That is not the case, and I will try again to explain, too briefly, what I’m getting at and why, because I think we have a lot more to gain than lose by learning to trust the narrative shape of our theology.

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’.

This post was originally attached to the thread about ‘Yoder on Paul and Protestantism’. Kingjames1 raised a question about the nature of the judgment represented by the destruction of Jerusalem:

I want to address Peter’s numerous comments about the coming of Jesus in a new post as we are getting well beyond the scope of a discussion of the Lord’s prayer. To my mind the question of perspective that arises here will be of crucial importance for us as we pursue the task of rethinking what it means to be in continuity with the biblical people of God. This is not fundamentally about which off-the-shelf eschatological schema we prefer; it is about how we make sense of ourselves biblically. My sense is that we are groping towards a new realism in how we read scripture and a new narrative framework within which to work out what it means as a community to know and serve the creator God. The whole process is immensely complex and no doubt confusing, but my hope is that through these (often repetitive) conversations we will all (I include myself!) remain sufficiently teachable for our minds to be slowly transformed by the Spirit of God. So here we go again…

On March 4th a documentary will air on the Discovery Channel discussing the 1980 find of the remains of Jesus and family.

1 - How would discovering the bones of Jesus change the belief that Jesus’ body rose to heaven on the third day?

2 - If DNA evidence could be retrieved from Mary, Jesus and Joseph - could it show that Jesus was their son?

3 - Who else is in that tomb with them? Mary Magdelan? Would we find some children? Would we be able to track there DNA to current descendants?

4 - If the science of this proves likely, what might be the impact on Christianity going forward? Would it force a re-thinking of the bible and a reorganization of church teachings?

In The New Testament and the People of God, NT Wright offers an epistemological theory as a necessary prolegomenon to his overall work. He does this because he wants to defend the gospels against the charge that their value as historical documents has been fatally compromised by their theological purposes. Wright’s epistomology is fatally flawed and leads to unsustainable conclusions about history.