The story continues with the creator acting by his own Spirit within the world, to bring it towards the restoration and new flourishing which is his intended goal.Ī great deal of Christian theology consists of the attempt to tell this story as clearly as possible, and to allow it to subvert other ways of telling the story of the world, including those which offer themselves as would-be Christian tellings but which, upon close examination, fall short in some way or other. The narrative concerns a creator and his creation humans made in this creator’s image and called to perform certain tasks the rebellion of humans and the dissonance of creation at every level and particularly about the creator’s acting, through Israel and climactically through Jesus, to rescue his creation from its ensuing plight. It tells the grand narrative about God and God’s relationship with the world, from creation to new creation, with Jesus in the middle. Bird: Christian theology is storied theology. Wright ( and Michael Bird ( talk about their book, The New Testament in Its World: An Introduction to the History, Literature, and Theology of the First Christians (Zondervan, 2019).īefore we get into specifics of the New Testament, how would you describe the grand narrative of Christian theology?

When you read the New Testament, do you intentionally try to think like a first-century Jesus follower to capture the visceral excitement of the early Christians? What was the first-century understanding of the kingdom of God? What is the real meaning of the resurrection in its original context? As 21st-century people, how do we recover the adventure of what it was like to live as Christians in the first or second centuries in the world of Second Temple Judaism amidst Greco-Roman politics?

The new testament and its world