The Fire and the Cloud: A Biblical Christology

by Chris E. W. Green

Overview

The Fire and the Cloud is a non-supersessionist biblical Christology developed from close readings of Israel’s Scriptures. In this work, the second in a trilogy that began with All Things Beautiful: An Aesthetic Christology, Chris E. W. Green tracks the recurrent and interwoven themes of exile, journey, and return across the canonical order, beginning with the story of Cain’s exile and ending with the homecoming of Naomi and Ruth. He examines crucial passages and their significance in later Jewish and Christian interpretations, reckoning honestly with the history of Christian anti-Jewishness and reminding us of the good news that the nations are being grafted into the people of God.

Beginning to end, Green’s figural—indeed, mystical—Christology lays itself open to the mysterious and transformative power of imaginative exegesis, seeking both to honor Israel’s unique, ongoing vocation as the people of God and to honor the church’s faith in and witness to Jesus, striving not to impose a dead image of him onto the ancient texts but to recognize his living likeness in their Spirit-inspired movements.

Green believes such interpretation is necessary and necessarily difficult, requiring us to read both with and against the grain of our convictions and commitments, expecting and allowing the biblical texts to teach us what we did not know we needed to learn differently. This is so, he argues, because a biblical Christology, if it is to be true to its purposes, must be capable of surprising us as the living word of the living Christ—confronting us in judgment, decentering us in praise, and sweeping us up into the covenant-making work of the Spirit for the sake of the nations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781481320504
Publisher:	Baylor University Press
Publication date:	04/01/2024
Pages:	382
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.34(d)

About the Author

Chris E. W. Green is Professor of Public Theology at Southeastern University. He is also the author of All Things Beautiful: An Aesthetic Christology.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I
1 Exile
2 Pilgrimage
3 Settlement

Part II
4 Exodus
5 Wandering
6 Occupation

Part III
7 Exile as Exodus
8 Settlement as Occupation
9 Pilgrimage as Homecoming

Conclusion

What People are Saying About This

Ellen F. Davis

In prose as pointed as it is poetic, Green argues against the twin forms of Christian arrogance, biblicism and supersessionism, that render a flat, sentimentalized figure of Jesus and set the church in arrogant opposition to Judaism. Seeking to repair this original distortion of Christology, he maps an exegetically rich journey, guided by Scripture’s witness to the God of outsiders, from Cain to Moses and Elijah to Naomi and Ruth, and finally to the Jesus of Matthew’s Gospel. Reading with some of the best interpreters from ancient times to the present, Green brings an imaginative freshness to familiar texts, revealing subtleties and interconnections that surprise and delight.

Steven Edward Harris

A Christology developed from the Old Testament is desperately needed—indeed, such is a  sine qua non of Christian faith. In  The Fire and the Cloud, Green offers a highly creative biblical Christology through select 'travel narratives' of the Hebrew Bible which highlights the complexity of the historical course of God with his people in Israel and as Jesus, and the course of his peoples, Jewish and Christian, with one another. It is, to my knowledge, the first sustained modern demonstration of the conviction that ' all the Scriptures testify to Christ' (Luke 24:27) applies to these narratives too.

John Behr

This is a brilliant and beautiful exposition of biblical Christology. Taking nine narratives from Israel’s Scripture, with their movement of exile and return, and the turning point at the crux of the narrative, Chris Green offers a deep reading of the text, insights from the history of interpretation, and a meditation, both penitential and doxological, on how these speak about the Christ. As the introduction explores, sensitively and profoundly, the Christian reading of Israel’s Scriptures need not be supersessionist, but can follow a different path, from a shared inheritance towards a shared future.