Helen Bond on the Apocalyptic Jesus (and Doctor Who!)

Helen Bond's latest op-ed piece on Bible and Interpretation is an enjoyable piece on The Relevance of an Apocalyptic Jesus including this gem:

Against this background, a non-apocalyptic Jesus sounds oddly complacent, stuck in an 80s time warp, when the only thing to rail about was conspicuous consumption and social inequalities. Of course, these things are important, and I don’t doubt that Jesus had something to say on the matter, but in a modern context these reconstructions seem to lack an important dimension. There is no point in teaching others to fiddle a better tune if Rome is about to burn all around you.

It's naturally a pleasure to see that other NT colleagues enjoy Doctor Who, but Helen is clearly not a geek, as this comment shows:

Over Christmas and New Year, six-million people in Britain tuned in to the popular TV series Dr Who, in a lengthy two-part special called "The End of the World" (luckily David Tennant averted disaster).

The two-parter was actually called "The End of Time", though Helen is quite right that its apocalyptic scenario witnesses to some taste for such things among the British public, who gave the two parts unprecedented appreciation indexes of 87 and 89 respectively. Helen's viewing figures are grossly underestimated; the total viewing figures for each episode were in fact over twelve million (source: Blogtor Who). If I were being really geeky, perhaps I might add too that while David Tennant clearly "averted disaster" he did so at the expense of his own identity, and now we have Matt Smith to look forward to.