andrewperriman.com

In an intriguing and ambitious book, Metavista: Bible, Church and Mission in an Age of Imagination, Colin Greene (the book is written with Martin Robinson) argues that ’the primary way the Bible was understood up until the modern period was as a unified narrative that narrates the identity of its primary agents and tells the story of God’s interaction with the cosmos’ (101).

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I gave Greg Boyd a copy of Re: Mission at the Christian Associates staff conference in Sopron. He read it straightaway and we had a highly invigorating chat about it on the bus to the airport. He has posted a short review of it on his blog. I’m delighted that he recommends the book so enthusiastically, but there are some matters raised by his review that I think need clarification.

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An interview that I did with Darren King, mostly about The Coming of the Son of Man but also touching on the need for a narrative-realist biblical theology, has just been published at Precipice magazine. This is how Darren introduces the interview:

One of the hallmarks of the Emerging Church is its desire, its commitment, to move beyond traditionalism, to examine various aspects of Christian faith with an openness to new answers - and new questions. While critics often (unfairly) accuse the movement of "rejecting the Bible", the reality is that those immersed within the EC conversation are often willing to embrace the complexities of the Bible in ways that are unfamiliar to others. And embracing the Bible means entering into the story, understanding the journey as it was for the earliest believers, as part of the process in receiving it as our own.

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A recent article in The New York Times (’Ancient Tablet Ignites Debate on Messiah and Resurrection’) has drawn attention to a stone tablet on which are inscribed 87 lines of Hebrew that ’may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days’. The stone came to light ten years ago, but its significance only became apparent after two Israeli scholars, Ada Yardeni and Binyamin Elitzur, published an analysis of what they called ’Gabriel’s Vision’ in the Hebrew language journal Cathedra.

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I receive a weekly email from the London Institute of Contemporary Christianity headed ’connecting with culture’. The most recent one talks about the excellent Street Pastors programme in London, which was started in 2003 by Les Isaac. Jason Gardner makes the point that part of the calling of the church must be to work alongside paramedics and the police to ’bring rescue to our violent streets’. The theological rationale for this, if you like, is stated in this way:

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I was recently invited to join a Facebook group named ’Initiative For Every Pastor To Read "Surprised By Hope" Before Easter 2009’, whose laudable objectives are defined as follows:

This group is for those who commit to doing everything in their power to encourage/force/entice/trick every pastor they know to read Surprised By Hope by N.T. Wright before Easter 2009.

This group is for all who can not sit through another Easter sermon by Pastor Frank Gospelman or Reverend Jeremy Smoothtongue....

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