Q. How then do we move forward, taking all this into account?   A. One way of moving forward is to say that this approach doesn’t make the kind of sharp distinction between scripture and tradition that has often been made. The church in each subsequent historical and cultural context has necessarily been engaged in the same three-level enterprise of social world construction and maintenance: proclaiming and articulating the gospel as the convictional core of the church’s identity; engaging in... Read more

One of the things that has struck various observers about the Black Lives Matter movement is it seems very different in some respects from the civil rights movement of the 60s, led my Martin Luther King Jr.  For example, if one reads the manifesto of the official BLM movement on its website (see e.g. https://blacklivesmatter.com/herstory/), one learns some surprising things.  The movement began, and continues not primarily to fight against racial injustice in general against non-white people, but you would not... Read more

Q. How, if at all, does this affect one’s views of the Scripture as inspired by God? A. I don’t have much to say here about inspiration itself; at least, this is not where I would want to begin. For me, the term is too bound up with approaches that begin with a preconceived idea of what scripture should look like, which then functions as a procrustean bed into which the actual scriptures as we have them are forced to... Read more

  Q. How to we really come to terms with these sorts of tensions?   A. In this case, it seemed to me that the most promising way of coming to terms with the tension was to recognize the element of “God’s unfinished business” in the early Christian claims. That is, claims about the significance of Christ were qualified by the expectation that his accomplishments will be brought to completion only with his “coming” in the future. In Luke’s words,... Read more

Q. On p. 417 you point out that Justin seems to have been the first Christian who consistently used the term ethne to refer to Gentile Christians, even to the point of seeing the use of that term in the Greek OT as prophecies about Gentile Christians, not about possible adherents to the Jewish faith from the Gentile world. This could be seen as part of the takeover by Christians of Jewish Scriptures as meant ultimately for Christians and predicting... Read more

Q.  Any suggestions as to how to help the church think more helpfully about these matters? A. Yes– the suggestion: that gentile Christians, as a process of self-discovery, adopt a (suitably revised) form of the other pattern of reading that was present in the proto-orthodox church—that is, a deliberate strategy of reading scripture—both Israel’s scripture and the New Testament—from the perspective of the nations/gentiles. Israel’s scripture presents us with a narrative involving God’s dealings with Israel, a people chosen from... Read more

Q. Any further thoughts along those lines?   A.  At the same time, however, the model mentioned in the previous blog post is not the only model that is present in the NT. On many of the significant questions that the early church had to wrestle with, we find a diverse set of answers—a diversity limited by their core convictions, but diversity nonetheless. So in Acts, for example, Luke’s view of the church seems to involve a community of Jewish... Read more

Q. At the end of this stimulating book you suggest that Gentile Christians today should perhaps read themselves in light not of the Hebrews or the Jews in Scripture but rather by identifying with the Gentiles in the narrative. The problem with this suggestion is that Paul, our earliest NT witness encourages us to see ourselves, along with believing Jews as the children of Abraham. While I certainly agree that anti-Semitism is a grotesque sin that must be avoided, nor... Read more

Q. I was a bit surprised that you don’t really deal in this book anyway with the use of the term christianos (meaning something like partisans of Christ or perhaps belonging to Christ on a par with Herodianos) which is depicted as outsider language used to describe the Jewish and Gentile followers of Christ in Antioch in the book of Acts. How come you don’t, especially in the light of the later use of similar language in the late second... Read more

Q. Let’s talk about the threefold way you have broken down the earliest Jewish followers of Christ and their approach to the issue of Gentile inclusion. P. 315 provides us with a good summary of what was previously argued with the three main views being: 1) the view that Christ is the messiah of Israel, and gentiles being brought into his following are being brought into Israel and into the keeping of the Mosaic covenant, even including circumcision and all... Read more