In their revision of Richard Hays’ formerly negative stance on same-sex relationships (see the chapter on homosexuality in The Moral Vision of the New Testament), Christopher Hays and his father claim to have found in scripture a progressive “widening” of the field of God’s mercy. “God repeatedly reveals an expansive mercy that embraces ever wider circles of people, including those previously deemed in some way alien or unworthy.”
Discussing Robert P. Jones’ book Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy, David Smith writes in the Guardian:Faced with shrinking numbers and cultural marginalisation, white evangelicalism embraced not spiritual renewal, but existential panic—… ()
The little book Why Jesus? is part of the materials for the Alpha Course. In it, Nicky Gumbel writes:Jesus is the only man who has ever chosen to be born, and he is one of the few who has chosen to die. He said that the entire reason for his coming was to die for us. He came ‘to give his… ( | 3 comments)
Westbourne Grove Church, which I help to lead, is part of the Forge Sphere of churches in the south of England, which used to be part of Salt & Light, which is a network of “neocharismatic Evangelical” churches associated with the British New Church Movement. ()
This is really just for fun. I was wondering whether to preach about wealth inequality next Sunday, but this is as far as I got.
Jesus tells a quite elaborate story about an unnamed rich man and a poor man called Lazarus. One early manuscript gives the rich man the name Neuēs.
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I was at the British New Testament Society conference this week, held at the magnificent St Patrick’s Pontifical University, Maynooth, in Ireland. This is the paper that I presented in the Divine Christology in Paul’s Letters session. It is a slightly updated summary of my argument in In… ( | 1 comment)
I suspect that “fake news” is a piece of trashy political sloganeering that will blow away when the wind next changes direction. But the larger picture is troubling: digital technologies, in different ways, on different levels, are undermining our sense of what is real. Katherine Viner wrote in the… ()
I think that something quite straightforward is going on when Paul writes that Jesus was en morphē theou—literally, “in form of god” (Phil. 2:6). English translations usually render this “in the form of God” or perhaps something like “in the nature of God.” But if there’s one thing that… ( | 2 comments)
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