The End of the Royal Arc

Pilgrim’s Pensieve #32

My recent realisation of an underlying royal narrative is an important milestone in my journey exploring Scripture. The name of this blog is a reference to John Bunyan’s story because Christianity for me has been an exciting journey of a pilgrim seeking understanding. So this blog has been somewhat of a travelogue in my expeditions into understanding Scripture.

The Royal Narrative

In the first part, I did an overview of Paul’s “narrative of glory” in Romans 1-8 from the work Of Dr Haley Goranson Jacob in her 2018 book Conformed to the Image of his Son: Reconsidering Paul’s Theology of Glory. Dr Jacob through an extensive study of the biblical texts has convincingly demonstrated that glory is primarily associated with rule not and not some form of divine luminance. Now the “narrative of glory” that Jacob traces in Romans is anthropological. It is about God’s intention for human rule over his creation, which was finally inaugurated in the ascension of Christ the King. Since human glory comes from God’s glory, we need a theological narrative of glory.

Jesus and the Early Church’s Mission

If Jesus was a prophet of Jewish restoration eschatology (see Ben Meyers; Ed Sanders; N.T. Wright; Richard Horsley), then it is important to note the impact that Jesus’s restoration eschatology had upon the early church who, in the transformed post-Easter context, carried forward Jesus’s appropriation of Israel’s sacred traditions about the restoration of Israel and the inclusion of the nations in God’s saving purposes.

It is in Luke–Acts that we observe how this story of Jesus as the agent of Israel’s restoration was taken up into the preaching and praxes of the first Christians…

Is the Bible really a story?

Andrew Bunt over at Think Theology considers an interesting challenge made by Dr. Brent Strawn to the popular slogan that the Bible is a story.

Rethinking Heaven, Hell and New Creation with N.T. Wright

The lecture below represents and distils much of N.T. Wright’s significant contribution to Christian thought and theology over the last four decades.