LITMIR.BIZ

This book is an exercise in a thoroughgoing narrative theology. The social and legal validation of same-sex relationships in the West over the last two decades has presented an immense challenge to the church insofar as it seeks to remain faithful to Scripture. But it is not an isolated ethical problem. It is just one element–albeit a very important one–in the much broader, long-term overhaul and reorientation of Western culture after the collapse of the Christian consensus. The forces of history that are driving this transformation, however, have also alerted us to the historical perspectives that constrained biblical thought. Andrew Perriman suggests that Paul's argument about same-sex behavior, perhaps more clearly than any other issue, highlights the narrative shape of the mission of the early church in the Greek world. By the same token, we must ask how that storyline has been refracted across the boundary of modernity, and how it now shapes the mission of the church as it adapts to its marginalized position in an aggressively secular world.

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At a time when the Western church is having to come to terms–painfully and often reluctantly–with its diminished social and intellectual status in the world following the collapse of Christendom, we find ourselves, as interpreters of Paul, increasingly impressed by the need to relocate his writings in their historical context. That is not a coincidence. The Future of the People of God is an attempt to make sense of Paul's letter to the Romans at the intersection of these two developments. It puts forward the argument that we must first have the courage of our historical convictions and read the text before Christendom, from the limited, shortsighted perspective of an emerging community that dared to defy the gods of the ancient world. This act of imaginative, critical engagement with the text will challenge many of our assumptions about Paul's «gospel of God,» but it will also put us in a position to reconstruct an identity and purpose for the people of God after Christendom that is both biblically and historically coherent

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