Rob Noland

“Resting in the calm eye of a storm raging all around him, Noah is saved in the ark as the flood surges over the land. In the flood narrative it is God who saves Noah from God. In the midst of the torrent of his own raging justice God places a floating ship of mercy.”
― Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

“Acts of faithful remembrance reach across the centuries without collapsing them. For example, the last supper is folded on top of the Passover feast, establishing a proximity across the centuries and retroactively reinterpreting the Passover meal itself as the foreshadowing of Christ’s death. Similarly, Psalm 22 is folded into Jesus’s experience and interpretation of the cross as if it had been written for that very moment—which, in fact, it had. In the pages of the Bible and in the Christian experience of time, promise and fulfilment kiss.”
― Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

“When human parents named a child in the ancient world, they would use the name to indicate what they hoped the child would become; when God names someone he names them according to what he knows they will become.”
― Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture

“God’s creative act, as well as created reality’s existing, and human action and knowing, all have about them the structure of pledge or promise—the one initiates, the other responds. Everything created is, in its very existence, covenant response.”
― Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture