I enjoyed the Wipf & Stock interview with Mike Gorman. Here are a few notes:
Theological interpretation = reading for the subject (Karl Barth)
“Don’t forget that this is primarily a course about God” (Richard Hays)
Missional hermeneutics: reading the Bible as Scripture in order to discern and participate in the mission of God, what is usually called the missio Dei.
- How does this text bear witness to the human predicament?
- How does this text bear witness to what God is up to to repair and renew that human condition?
- And thirdly, how does this text bear witness to the responsibility of God’s people to be involved in that reparation of the human condition?
Missional theosis: we become transformed into the image of God by participating in the divine mission. It’s that we become more like God when we have the opportunity to participate in what God is up to in the world either individually or corporately, according to the testimony of Scripture.
Paul’s core message: in Christ God has intervened in human history to create a new humanity that’s characterized by faith—or faithfulness—hope, and love, and that we all are invited to participate in the spreading of that new humanity.
I like to read—and I like to encourage other people to read—Revelation as really focused on Christ the Lamb who was slaughtered and raised… It has to do with the worship of the Lamb, as well as of God the Father. It has to do with the struggle between the misguided marriage of religion and political power. The book of Revelation stands over against that, in my term, “civil religion.” Today, we might call it Christian nationalism or religious nationalism. Revelation’s trying to undermine that and show its demonic—literally demonic—and dangerous quality and to offer an alternative way of being not only human but of being Christian, anticipating this new creation that we see in Revelation 21 and 22.
the starting point … for Christian ethics is that the gospel reveals to us a God who is wanting to promote and provide life for humanity individually and corporately from womb to tomb…. It seems to me nonviolence is not a superficial supplement to the gospel or an add-on, but rather it’s at the very core of what God’s up to in the world and what the gospel calls us to.
