[This article was originally posted on Open Source Theology. Further discussion can be found there.]

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.

1. Historical narratives can have a powerful shaping influence without being transposed into universal, existential or mythical categories. I still think the significance of the exodus narrative for Old Testament Jewish identity is a good precedent. At some level it came to function as a metaphor for Israel’s perpetually felt calling and sense of redemption, so that Jews of every generation could see themselves as members of the exodus community. Rob Bell makes this point in Velvet Elvis:

…in a Jewish synagogue to this day, you will probably hear kids taught the story of exodus as their story. A friend of mine recently heard a Jewish kid say, "We were slaves in Egypt and Moses led us out, and we complained in the wilderness." (59)

But this makes sense only because the exodus was understood first as a historical event by which a people was brought from slavery to freedom. Whatever we may subsequently make of Jesus’ death, it is historically a saving event because it ensured the survival of a people that would otherwise have been consigned the dustbin of history. We should certainly not be indifferent to that fact. In the Lord’s Supper we repeatedy tell the story of Jesus just as Israel repeatedly told the story of the exodus in the Passover meal.

2. One thing of crucial importance that I think is gained by the historical reading is a sense of the priority in God’s purposes of the people which he called in Abraham to be his new creation and to be a blessing to the world. Perhaps this is overstating the point, I don’t think we will properly understand the missional task of the ‘church’ until we grasp the significance of the concrete historical and narrative existence of this people. Jesus did not start a new religion; he rescued a people that had badly lost its bearings and got them on the right track again.

3. Shiert argues that ‘we cannot ignore that which is "deep and universal", for to do so would fail to respect and do justice to the Jesus that is the Divine Christ’. My response would be that it is fully in keeping with the biblical witness that we find both what is ‘deep and universal’ and the divinity of the Christ in the narrative-historical structures of scripture. To be ‘new creation’ is not a pious abstraction; it has to do with the ongoing existence of a community endeavouring to live righteously in a difficult, threatening, and changing world. That is what we mean by ‘incarnation’. The alternative, frankly, is Gnosticism: the myth of a redeemer who descends into the created world to rescue the illuminati from its corruption.

This is not to say that we can only construct our ‘truth’ narratively. We are a creative people, and we must always learn to speak about our existence in the world philosophically, sociologically, artistically, mystically, and so on. But insofar as we regard ourselves as a biblical people (I think that this is a crucial choice that the church as it emerges from Christendom has to make), surely it is incumbent upon us at some basic level to think biblically. We don’t have to understand that in foundational terms: it can be a matter of process, critical examination, dialogue; it can be a matter of simple uninterpreted story-telling or the liturgical reading of scripture. But it is all too easy, otherwise, to develop a belief system that is at odds with the biblical witness.

4. If for no other reason I would defend the historical reading on the grounds that it makes better sense of the New Testament than the traditional evangelical hermeneutic, which must somehow cut everything to fit the procustean bed of a myth of personal salvation. The parable of the two builders and the storm is a good example. It makes for much better exegesis to read this in both its historical and its literary context as a judgment-warning to first century Israel in the language of Old Testament prophecy than as piece of decontextualized universal wisdom. Of course, no one is going to stop us using the parable today in order to illustrate everyman’s spiritual dilemma, but what invariably happens in the mind of the church is that the contemporary personal application takes over and becomes the filter through which scripture is read. I think that if we are serious about being a biblical people, something needs to be done about that.

5. I’m not sure that the early church drifted away from the narrative framework of the Jesus story quite as quickly as Sam seems to suggest. The Jesus story at least includes the foreseen destruction of Jerusalem: it is not just about his life, death and resurrection; he has a great deal to say about a future chain of events culminating in judgment on his opponents and the vindication of his followers. I would also argue that the early church quite properly extended the Jesus story (as the story of the Son of man) to include within its narrative scope the victory of the suffering community over Rome. Paul’s persistent focus on the parousia is to my mind evidence that he is thinking historically and realistically about the condition and fate of the communities for which he is responsible. A large part of Romans (in fact, I would argue the whole of Romans) has to do with the historical dilemma faced by Israel under judgment. Paul has moved on from the Gospel story but he has not lost sight of the trajectory of the Christ and its implications for the immediate concrete existence of the churches.

Paul makes extensive use of the Old Testament in his teaching, and I think we have to assume that not only his Jewish but also his Gentile readership would have been well acquainted with the scriptural narratives. There is certainly a strong case for thinking that many of the early Gentile converts would have come from the ranks of the God-fearers. In any case, they were taught from the scriptures (2 Tim. 3:16). What I see in the New Testament is a community very consciously and urgently struggling to understand its place in history and its prospects for the future in the light of the Old Testament texts.

6. If we are genuinely at a point in history when we must construct a new paradigm for what it means to be church, then I think we have to go all the way back in our imaginations to the core historical narratives and, as best we can, learn to tell the story again. I think that this is the best safeguard we have against defaulting to the deeply ingrained structures of evangelical tradition. I also think that it is the best way not to fall into the ‘liberal’ trap of subjectively picking out the bits of doctrine that we like and throwing the rest away.

Let the story stand for what it is, apart from our pressing need to appropriate it for ourselves. Once we have done that, we can start working forwards again and ask what it means to live now in the light of that story. My fear, however, is that we won’t go back far enough to find the road that will lead us through the ‘eschatological crisis’ of the end of the age of Christendom into a new age and a new paradigm. The old Christendom-modern paradigm is pervasive and extremely powerful, and it very quickly reassimilates our attempts to reimagine the biblical narrative. It needs to be resisted.