The odour of sanctity

The last few months have been hugely challenging, and for most of us I would guess very draining in different ways.  The stresses and strains thrown up by pandemic and lockdown have been varied, but I guess there are very few people who have not found themselves under pressure in one way or another.  If nothing else, the general background anxiety has been exhausting.  We're tired, aren't we?

Which is unfortunate, because I think the next bit is going to be hard and draining in different ways.  At least going into lockdown there was a sense that we were all pulling together, that it was a response to an emergency in which we were all involved.  That sense has largely dissipated now.  Partly I think that's just a natural thing; as lockdown has dragged on beyond what many were expecting, the goals have become less clear and frustration has set in.  Then again, our leaders don't seem to have set shining examples in every case, which undermines the sense of being all in it together.  And of course, we ourselves have begun to divide into those who have been applying rules and guidelines more rigorously, those who like to think they've been maintaining the spirit of the law whilst using their own judgement as to the details, and those who have just given up being locked down altogether.  Since all three groups tend to look down on the others, an increasing sense of division is probably inevitable.  Added to that, as we gradually emerge from lockdown there will be those who want to move faster (and those who de facto do move faster, whatever the official line) and those who are still too anxious to leave the house.  Then again, as the sense of immediate crisis passes, and the analysis of what has happened takes over, there will be differing views on what was done right or wrong, ranging right from a sense that lockdown was pointless and damaging through to lockdown was too late and insufficiently rigorous.

All this is going on, and I am anticipating more difficult and tiring times ahead.

Now, we can't control the times, but we can control to some extent our reactions to them.  I am not in the business of political or social punditry, so I don't have to offer opinions on everything, thankfully.  But I do have some observations on how Christians have been reacting and ought to react.  I advance them somewhat hesitantly, and with a genuine sense that I have not myself worked out what an adequate reaction would look like in practice; nor have I fully lived up to what I do know to be right.  But I also feel these things increasingly as an urgent burden.

Firstly, Christian responses should be characterised at every stage by humility.  There should be humility at every stage.  We should be humble about our own knowledge - do we really know and understand the full story in any given case?  Have we got a grasp of the details?  Our culture is quick to react, and tends to react emotionally.  Humility demands a brake on my reactions, a refusal to allow my immediate emotional response to determine my overall approach.  That doesn't mean being unemotional, or suppressing our emotional responses.  It just means recognising that our first response may not be the best response, because we may not - indeed, we probably do not - see the full picture at first.

Then again, humility is necessary as we think about other people.  Whether they are people in government, the neighbours who we see breaking the rules, or the friends who won't move as quickly back to normality as we would like, we need to react humbly.  With people in power, in particular, where there is a civic duty to hold them to account for their use of power, it is easy to act with pride.  Can I be honest and say I see that in a lot of responses from Christians to government in particular?  It is not that we should never be angry, but our anger should be tempered by the fact that we know we are not dealing here with monsters or demons, but that more tricky class of being: fallible and sinful human beings.  It might be worth asking ourselves how certain we are that we would have done better in the circumstances.  Would I definitely have been more competent?  Would I definitely have been more righteous?  I don't feel that I can tread with confidence here.  Certainly I don't feel I can react only with anger towards those who have tried and failed, or even towards those who haven't really tried.

Second, alongside humility we need to show hope.  How does it come across in our response that we have an ultimate hope that God is working everything - everything! - together for good?  In our response, does it look like we believe in the resurrection?  The unique Christian hope ought to enable a unique Christian response here.  The world swings back and forth between shallow hope on the one hand, and grief and anger on the other.  Christians are called to grieve as those with hope, to be angry as those who know that underneath are the everlasting arms.  This is not meant to be a background hope, against which we carry on much as everyone else.  It is meant to be transformative.  We are Easter people.  Our hopes are not in this world, but in the resurrected Christ.  But that hope, securely grounded in heaven, is meant to transform our response to what happens on earth.  I'm not seeing that, in me or in others, to the extent that I think the gospel demands.

Third, and this one is a bit more vague and sadly doesn't begin with 'h', we need some better content to our responses.  Not all, but a lot, of the response I've seen from Christians has been in content identical with the response of  (particular sectors of) society.  To be very blunt, if the content of our response to this crisis reads like a Guardian editorial, it is a political and not a specifically Christian response.  I am not here making a party political point; nor am I saying that Christians shouldn't be engaged in politics.  But I worry that our response is indistinguishable from that of the world.  We don't seem to have anything more to say than can be said by any 'progressive' person; and it seems to me that Christians who don't subscribe to 'progressive politics' have nothing whatsoever to say.  I am glad this isn't universal - I'm glad that there are responses looking for hope in a Covid world - but I feel the lack of distinctively Christian shape to my own responses and thoughts.

Distinctively Christian shape.  That's what I miss in myself and in much of what I see online.  I feel that we - that I - have failed to communicate into this crisis the weighty, solemn, joy of the gospel.  I don't think that people would look at me, and see someone who is set apart from the world, someone whose hope is in heaven.  I worry that the church doesn't have the odour of sanctity, that we don't reek of Christ in this crisis as we ought to do.  I don't think anyone would look at us and think that we actually live in a different world from them - and I think that ought to be the case, even as we work hard to get alongside people and to prove that we are committed to serving this world which we share.  The paradox of the gospel - that we are separate from the world and therefore committed to the world in Christ - I don't think that is coming across.  We're not strange enough right now.

As we approach Pentecost, I want to properly pray, that in the midst of the mental, physical, emotional, spiritual weariness of this time, we would be refreshed by the power and presence of the Holy Spirit of God, bringing the presence of Christ to us, giving the reality of the gospel to us, making us - making me - different.  Veni, Creator Spiritus.

In praise of postmodernism

It may be just a perverse tendency in me, but I sometimes find that I want to defend intellectual positions which Christians have become accustomed to consider as 'the enemy'.  I've written a few times about humanism.  When I was growing up, humanism was the great evil (sometimes, of course, qualified as secular humanism, but often not).  I have since come to believe that humanism is the fruit of Christianity, and that secular humanism is merely the picked (and therefore dying) fruit.  Christians ought to defend, not vilify, humanism, and they ought to do so in the name of Christ and the gospel.  I think in particular that they ought to defend humanism now, because humanism is under threat.  Secular humanism hasn't the internal vitality, the intellectual strength, to resist the basic drift away from valuing human life, for example.  It hasn't the power to insist on humanity in the face of market forces.  Christians should be at the humanist barricades, not fighting under the flag of humanism but under the flag of Christ.

More recently I've noted that wider Western culture has begun to turn its back on one of those other great bugbears of my Christian youth: postmodernism.  Postmodernism, as we knew very well as undergraduates, was evil because it taught that there was no absolute truth, and therefore made everything relative.  In the wider culture for a long time postmodernism was regarded as both liberating and necessary, the former because it meant that I could live my own narrative without regard to any great metastory, and the latter because it meant the avoidance of bitter conflict.  I can live in my world, and you can live in yours.

In recent years, the growth in 'fake news' and the way in which the postmodern insistence on the inviolability of a personal narrative has become a political weapon has put our culture off.  People who were absolute relativists (so to speak) a decade ago are now crying out that truth matters, that there is real truth.  Lots of people in the church see this as a very positive move.

But I am fond of aspects of postmodernism, and I'd hate to lose them.

The new modernism, the new insistence on real truth which is true for everyone, seems like it accepts the Christian position that there is true truth out there.  But because it doesn't put that claim in a Christian framework, it misses something which postmodernism saw more clearly: that just because there is true truth out there doesn't mean that it is easy to access, or that the truth which I think I know corresponds to this absolute truth.  The new modernism seems to me to be actually a return to the naive modernism of the Enlightenment and of Kant.

Ah, Immanuel Kant.  The philosophy of Kant is something else that I love even though Christians are meant to be against it.  I mean, it's really badly wrong in lots of ways, but the key insights are genuinely, well, insightful.  For Kant the key thing in epistemology (or so it seems to me, though I doubt he would have put it like this; he would have put it in hundreds of pages of incomprehensible German) is that we all think and know as humans.  That means that we think and know within certain limitations, certain forms - we think, for example, in terms of time and space.  For Kant, that limits what we can know, but that's okay; knowing the limits, we can proceed with confidence within them.  And Kant and his ilk really thought that if everyone just used reason (and observation) correctly, they would all come to the same conclusions.

The postmodern development is to insist that not only must I think and know as a human, but I must think and know as me.  My culture, my background, my past experiences - all these shape and influence the way that I think and know, just as my basic humanity (if there is such a thing) does.  Just as, for Kant, I cannot step out of humanity to think things without time or space, postmodernism observes that I cannot step out of my particular place and vantage point.  I am located, and I see and think and know from that location.

Now, this is true.  The Christian revelation clearly shows us two things which are deeply relevant to epistemology.  The first is that there is truth, true truth: Truth.  It shows us that there is Truth not by an abstract philosophical doctrine but by the personal appearance of Truth Incarnate amongst us.  But the second is that we do not have obvious and unproblematic access to Truth.  We are both finite (and therefore have a limited perspective) and fallen (and therefore pervert the truth, both wilfully and unconsciously).  Christians do well to remember both: the insights, if you like, of modernism and postmodernism held together.  We need to remember them because the new modernism is already making our natural human tribalism worse: I can see that something is true, so if you don't agree you must be a spreader of fake news.  Rather than wondering whether the other person's different conclusion flows from a different perspective - and therefore might include elements of truth that I can't see so easily from my vantage point - we assume that they are simply party-biased, denying the truth because it is to their advantage.  Ironically, the response to the fact that postmodern epistemology has been weaponised is to weaponise modernism.

There is no epistemic humility, the kind of humility which should follow from knowing that Truth Incarnate could knock on your front door and you wouldn't recognise him unless Truth Inbreathed enabled you.  You, left to yourself, wouldn't recognise truth if it was throwing the tables around in your temple.

So half a cheer for postmodernism.  There was something profoundly right in it all.  Shame if in our scramble to recover Truth we forgot all about it.

On life, contra Pinker

Yesterday saw Twitter graced with this from the popular science writer Steven Pinker:

Belief in an afterlife is a malignant delusion, since it devalues actual lives and discourages action that would make them longer, safer, and happier. Exhibit A: What’s really behind Republicans wanting a swift reopening? Evangelicals. https://t.co/ppo2bwiVGn

— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) May 21, 2020

Is that right?  Leave aside the Washington Post article to which he links, which I think makes a rather more nuanced point: is it right to state that belief in an afterlife devalues actual lives and discourages actions that would make them longer, safer, and happier?

First of all we'd have to clarify what was meant by 'an afterlife'.  It is common in the handling of religion by our new atheists to try to lump things together as if they were all the same; indeed, the notion that 'religion' can be treated as a monolithic thing is one of the hallmarks of contemporary approaches.  But not all afterlives are the same.  'Afterlife' could cover views including reincarnation (a further life, or further lives, to be lived within this physical world, albeit possibly in a different animal form) as well as some sort of spiritual survival (a ghostly element of the human make up to live on in some form, probably in another world).  Different forms of afterlife will have different effects on the understanding of the value of this life.  For example, the ancient Greeks believed in an afterlife, but it was a grim old business, and would hardly have made one keen to go there.

Christians, as N.T. Wright is keen to point out, believe not so much in an afterlife but in life after the afterlife.  That is to say, we look forward to real flesh and blood resurrection, on the model of the resurrection of Jesus, in a renewed physical creation.  That is a particular view of what happens after death.  It has, moreover, other concomitant beliefs  - in a judgement based on the way this life has been lived; in that life as being therefore related to this life by way of consequence.  That matters.

Okay, so not all afterlives are created equal.  Does the Christian view of the afterlife devalue actual lives in the here and now?  Does it discourage action to make lives in the here and now longer and happier?

The history of Christianity would point to the opposite - and again I can't adequately recommend Tom Holland's overview of that history in Dominion.  But I think we can also think it out from first principles.  What does the physical resurrection of Christ demonstrate?  Amongst other things, that God is interested in and committed to this physical life.  Resurrection - rather than, say, the survival of the human spirit - says that this world is not a mere preliminary to a better more spiritual existence.  This world is the goal.  It is for the restoration of this world that Christ gave up his life, and it is the firstfruits of the restoration of this world which we see in his resurrection.  Not pie in the sky when you die, then.

But what about all those biblical references which seem to downplay the value of this life in comparison with the next?  When the apostle Paul says that the sufferings of this time are not to be compared with the future glory isn't he basically denigrating this life?  When he says that we Christians are pitiable if we only have hope for this life, isn't he devaluing this life?

We need to keep firmly in mind that in both cases Paul is talking about resurrection, and the restoration of creation, and not the immortality of the soul - that is to say, not escape from this physical world and this ordinary human life, but the hope of the renewal of the world and the perfection of this human life.  That is the consistent perspective of the Bible.  But more than that, it's important to consider that Paul is in fact expressing his willingness to pour himself out for others, in their service, because he doesn't need to squeeze everything he can for himself out of this mortal life.  He doesn't need to, because resurrection is assured.  The hope of resurrection, then, gives Paul the liberty to put his life wholly at the service of others.  Now, I'm sure Steven Pinker wouldn't like the way Paul serves others - as a missionary preacher - but that's because there are fundamental disagreements between Pinker and Paul on the subject of what life and the world is all about.  But for the purposes of this argument, the key thing is just this: the Christian's resurrection hope - being a certain hope, based on Jesus' resurrection - liberates from self-interest and enables devotion to others.  And of course over the centuries that devotion has expressed itself not only in missionary endeavour but also in nursing the sick, or raising up schools.  Because it is commitment to life.

To conclude, it's worth briefly considering the alternative.  Suppose we emerged from a meaningless world, sentient by accident, by a cruel trick of fate concerned for - indeed, needing - meaning and purpose in a universe which ultimately has none...  It is not clear to me why any of this should lead to valuing life.  It may lead to a clinging to life, because the alternative is the collapse back into the meaningless darkness from which we came; but then, why prefer the meaningless light to the meaningless darkness?  I just can't see it.  And you know what, if you only live once, I think there's a huge amount of logic to getting as much out of it as you can, regardless of the impact on others.  I'm glad atheists like Pinker don't typically think like this - but I think they're hugely illogical in not drawing this conclusion.  You see, the expectation of post-mortem judgement by God for the Christian is simply a reflection of the profound certainty that in God's meaningful world every action matters; our being and doing are significant, of consequence.  Remove God and you can of course removed the burden of that responsibility; but you also remove the significance of human life.

Take out the resurrection, and you may well be committed to making human lives happier, longer, safer.  But who cares?  What is the value of a human life?  What would it matter if you had chosen differently?

Going to heaven

One effect of lockdown has been to make me much more acutely aware of location.  I am, as I have mostly been for the last couple of months, at home.  Location has been revealed as one of those things which has much more effect on my life than I had ever realised.  Being perpetually in my house makes work and rest more difficult.  It shrinks the world of my experience.  It restricts my access to others.  (And as I write this I am very aware that this is the reality all the time for many people: those justly or unjustly imprisoned, those who are housebound or hospital-bound through illness and disability...)  I am currently unusually conscious of where I am and what that means for me and my life.

As the pastor of a church I'm also particularly conscious of what is not happening: the church is not gathering together for worship.  Given that corporate worship is what the whole of creation is actually for, this is a big deal.  We are seeing each other, digitally, and hearing the word of God through our screens; but it makes the world of difference that we are located in our lounges (actually I get banished to the kitchen for preaching purposes) and not in the same place.  With the greatest respect to those who would love this digital interaction to be a part of our 'new normal' post-Covid, it is not the same thing as a physical gathering.  It must never become the norm, even if we might consider how greater use of technology might be made to ameliorate the cases of those who simply cannot gather.  Location matters.

But today is Ascension Day, and that also has a great deal to do with location.  Where is Jesus?  He has gone 'to heaven'.  That is to say, he has gone to the place of God's immediate presence and power.  Biblically, heaven is the place from which God hears prayer, sends help and judgement, acts and reveals himself.  Each act and intervention of God is a movement from heaven to earth.  The ascension of Christ is a movement from earth to heaven only because it completes an earlier movement from heaven to earth; in that sense, it is the counterpart to the moment of incarnation.

Jesus is in heaven.  But because Jesus' people are united with him, we can also be said to be in heaven - seated in the heavens, our lives hidden in heaven with Christ.  We are in heaven, in terms of our identity, our status, because Jesus is in heaven and we are in Jesus.  (Worth pondering, in terms of location, the regular address to Christians in the NT as those who are 'in Christ' - because this is often paired with a city, e.g., the saints who are in Christ in Philippi.  Both are location terms.  Of course, for the NT being in Christ is a far more significant location than being in Philippi.)

But this is also described in another way.  In the Letter to the Hebrews, which is all about the priestly movement into God's presence, we are urged to take advantage of the blood of Christ shed for us and to enter the sanctuary - not meaning any earthly sanctuary, but the very heavenly sanctuary which is the original of all earthly sanctity.  (And it is not coincidental but important that this is at once linked to the importance of meeting together, for this entry into the sanctuary - accomplished by Christ and received by faith - is symbolised and therefore to some extent experienced when believers come together in worship).

What do we come to when we draw near?  According to Hebrews 12 it is the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God, the place where Jesus is.  It is heaven.

We are in heaven, because we are in Jesus.  We come to heaven when we pray, when we meditate, particularly when we come together in corporate worship.  We do well to hold on to both perspectives: we are there, static, immovable, because that is the status Jesus has; but in our experience we draw near, we approach, we enter.  Lose sight of the former and anxiety will set in - how can we approach God in his heaven?  Lose sight of the latter and all sense of relationship with God will disappear - just accept salvation and then get on with your life without reference to God.

So this is a striking thing.  Wherever we are located on earth - and as noted above, this is not an entirely insignificant factor; far from it! - we are able to go to heaven.  Going to heaven is not something that happens when you die; it is something that happens when you pray, when you believe, when you worship.  Let's draw near with faith.

The new religion

According to this article in the NYT, the National Health Service is "the new Church of England" - indeed, it is "almost holy".  "We all have respect for nurses, who are ‘angels,’ and doctors, who are ‘gods’", says John Appleby.  I don't think this is an entirely new thing.  There have been dogmas surrounding the NHS for some time, and corresponding heresies and heterodoxies.  The air of sanctity has been attached to the idea of the NHS for years, even if the reality has sometimes fallen short.  What has most noticeably changed in the wake of Covid-19 is the move towards unconcealed worship, both of the institution ("Thank you NHS!") and its human avatars ("Clap for carers").

And that all makes a lot of sense.

The Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann, in his book For the Life of the World, points out that "Secularism is a religion because it has a faith, it has its own eschatology and ethics.  And it 'works' and it 'helps'.  Quite frankly, if 'help' were the criterion, one would have to admit that life-centred secularism helps actually more than [traditionally conceived] religion."  He sees the modern hospital as the epitome of the secular world: "Hospitals and medicine are among its best achievements."  Here is a religion that gets us along, that is unequivocally devoted to helping humanity, and moreover succeeds very well at doing that.

What does Christianity have to offer in comparison with that?

Schmemann maintains that Christianity is different.  "For Christianity, help is not the criterion.  Truth is the criterion."  Where the church allows itself to be drawn into the grand secular project of helping, it will either find itself dropping all the 'God stuff' in favour of social work and counselling (and therefore, frankly, becoming redundant, because secularism can do this at least as well as the church), or it will adopt a sort of chaplaincy role, helping people at the point where secularism can no longer help - that is to say, helping them to be reconciled to the idea of death.  This, Schmemann thinks, is the adaptation of the traditional role of religion to the present age.

But Christianity is here to provide salvation, and salvation "is not only not identical with help, but is in fact opposed to it."  The church is not there to give a helping hand with modern society's various projects, nor is it there to provide a sort of backstop service, to domesticate death.  In fact, it is only in the Christian gospel that death is revealed for what it is: the great enemy which makes a mockery of all humanity's helping and working.

Unlike the NHS, the Christian church and the Christian gospel are no help.  If anything they problematise life and death in a way which we might think we could do without.  We don't have any help to offer - although of course incidentally the church and Christians will and should assist in different ways, as members of society and moreover as servants of all.  But fundamentally it is not help, it is nothing that works, that we have to offer.

In Luke's Gospel, Jesus has an encounter with a paralysed man.  Faced with the fellow, lowered through the roof in front of him, Jesus pronounces his sins forgiven.  And only secondarily, to show his authority to forgive, he also heals him of his paralysis.  It is clear which of the two acts is helpful, and it is also clear which Jesus regards as more important.  The healing is an appropriate sign of salvation, an appropriate accompaniment to it, because salvation is indeed about life and wholeness; it is not about a rejection of this world and of human life, but of its redemption.  But forgiveness is the reality of salvation, since to be saved is fundamentally to be reconciled to God.  But what help is such reconciliation?  From Luke's perspective it is clear that salvation would have come to the man even if he had been left unmoving on his bed...

All of which is to say, Christianity is not helpful, and if we're looking for religion of help we'd be better off worshipping the health service.  But Christianity is salvation, a new life beyond the life we know, the life that works.  Terribly impractical.  No use.  But salvation for all that.

Blessing

Lots of people have shared this fantastic video, in which Christians from across the churches of the UK sing a blessing over the nation as it struggles with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.  I watched it and I was deeply moved; shed a couple of tears even.  To see the church together is beautiful.  To realise the unity there is in Christ is wonderful.  But...

But?  How much of a party-pooper do you have to be to put a 'but' at the end of that intro?  Turns out, this much of a party-pooper.

I'm a Pastor.  Pronouncing a blessing is part of my job - whether it's the Aaronic blessing on children welcomed into the world, or the blessing of the Trinity on the gathered congregation, or the blessing on the eucharistic food which we take to remember Christ.  I like to bless.  But I worry, oh I worry.  I worry that maybe we're missing what's going on.  I worry that we're missing the moment.

The thing is, I don't have the power to pronounce a blessing, not unilaterally.  I can only bless where God blesses.  And I worry.  Is this the moment for a blessing?  Can we pronounce a blessing over an apostate and unrepentant nation?  Can we pronounce the blessings of Israel over a people who will not have the God of Israel?

What if this country were to be blessed?  I suspect that the first fruit of real blessing would not be peace but a deep grief over who we are and what we've done.  If God turned his face towards us, of necessity much of what we value would shrivel up and die.  Maybe I misread the situation, but I don't see the UK as ripe for blessing.  Mercy.  Mercy is what we need.  And perhaps a church which is more ready to get back up the mountain and fast and plead rather than pronounce a blessing.

Oh, I don't know.  Maybe I'm just the Grumpy Pastor.  I want to bless.  God knows I want to bless.  But the only blessing I have to pronounce is the death of the sinner in the death of Christ, and I don't think many people want to hear that.

The ransom

Reading John Owen's Death of Death and Karl Barth's treatment of the atonement in Church Dogmatics IV/1 somewhat concurrently is interesting.  The theological modes in which these two thoroughly Christ-centred theologians operate are very different, and that show in their conclusions.  I am particularly struck that Owen relies very heavily in his work on ransom imagery.  His book is polemical, aimed at promoting a theology of limited or definite atonement; his particular target is those who teach a 'general ransom'.  Owen's argument is long and detailed, but at the heart of it is the apparently inescapable conclusion that for whomever a ransom is paid, that person must in justice be set free; therefore, if a general ransom - a ransom for all - has been paid in the death of Christ, all must be saved.  Since he (rightly) regards universalism as obviously contrary to the witness of Holy Scripture, he considers that the general ransom is to be rejected by all who bow to Scripture's authority.

Barth frames his teaching entirely differently, focusing on legal imagery - "the Judge judged in our place".  He works this through thoroughly, and only at the very end of his treatment looks to other images.  He discusses priestly and cultic imagery at greatest length, corresponding to the more prominent place these images have in the NT - the book of Hebrews, for example, revolves entirely around this way of viewing the atonement.  Indeed, Barth suggests that this would have been just as good a way of structuring the whole of his treatment, except that it is more obscure to us than the legal imagery.  (He speculates that it may have been the primary mode of understanding the atonement in the earliest Christian communities).  He deals very briefly (in a single short paragraph) with military imagery and the concept of victory, but is unconvinced it would be helpful to develop this systematically even though a place must be preserved for it in our understanding of the atonement.  (So much for the suggestion, which I have regularly seen, that Barth prefers Christus Victor as a model of the atonement rather than penal substitution; this is simply unsustainable on any straightforward reading of the Dogmatics.)  And financial imagery - the ransom - gets a similarly brief review.  Barth acknowledges that the NT does "strangely enough" contain this image, but thinks that "this strand is relatively slender".  He considers that it would be difficult and unprofitable to use this as a framework for the whole doctrine of atonement.

Different approaches, very different conclusions.  I'm not going to dive into the rights and wrongs of either here (except to say the only way to begin to do that dive would be an overview of the relative strengths of the different images used in the NT, with their OT background, and not primarily a detailed exegesis of particular passages).  It just interests me that so much can rest on which set of NT images becomes the main interpretive lens of your engagement with doctrine.