The form of this order of things is passing away: who is wrong—Paul or Matthew Thiessen?

I said I would come back to Matthew Thiessen’s “incoherent” account of Paul’s eschatology, so here we are. Chapter four of A Jewish Paul: The Messiah’s Herald to the Gentiles is about Paul the “End-Time Jew.” Thiessen begins: “Paul never wrote an autobiography. Why would he when he expected an imminent end to the current structure of the cosmos?” (49).

This “apocalyptic expectation” was central to Paul’s thought. His response to concerns expressed by the group of believers in Thessalonica was not that the parousia would be delayed indefinitely but that many of his readers would live to see it. Paul includes himself among the living who would be caught up in the clouds, after the resurrected dead, to be with the Lord forever (1 Thess. 4:15-17). Thiessen says: “Paul expected Jesus to return during the lifetime of some of his readers (and possibly during his own lifetime)” (50).

Read more...
Jesus and Jonah at sea: what the disciples learned
The relevance of Psalm 107:28-29 for understanding Jesus’ imperious rebuke of the wind and waves is often noted: some went down to the sea in ships; the Lord “commanded and raised the stormy wind, which lifted up the waves of the sea”; they were terrified and cried out to the Lord, and he “made the… ( | 2 comments)
The ends of the ages: church in the Anthropocene
Speaking at Davos last year, David Attenborough said, “The Holocene has ended. The Garden of Eden is no more.” He makes the point again in the compelling new Netflix documentary A Life on Our Planet. The juxtaposition of terms from two very different fields of discourse is intriguing. Can we do… ( | 2 comments)
What was Paul thinking when he wrote “Christ… the one being over all, God, blessed for the ages” (Rom. 9:5)?
Does Paul say that Christ is God in Romans 9:5? He speaks with candour about his anxiety regarding the future of Israel. He could wish himself “anathema from the Messiah” for the sake of his own race according to the flesh, of whom are “the glory and the covenants and the giving of the Law and the… ( | 1 comment)
The shortfall in Christ’s sufferings: mystical union, messianic woes, the hardships of evangelism, or none of the above?
On The Gospel Coalition site Phil Thompson asks what Paul means when he says, “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (Col. 1:24). How could anything be lacking in Christ’s… ( | 6 comments)
What happened to the promised land? It became the promised empire
Andrew Bunt provides a quick and lucid overview of the argument of Oren Martin’s book Bound for the Promised Land: The land promise in God’s redemptive plan (2015). I have not read the book. Martin thinks—assuming that Bunt has understood him correctly—that the land of Canaan was … ()
Woke Church, heaven, and a slight problem with the great multi-ethnic multitude
I have been reading Eric Mason’s book Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice. It’s not the book I was expecting it to be. It’s an honest, heartfelt attempt, written from within the black community, to connect modern imperatives of racial… ( | 5 comments)
Which Lord shall we provoke to jealousy?
Following on from the discussion of whether Paul includes Jesus in the divine identity in 1 Corinthians 8:6, let’s consider the claim that Paul identifies Jesus with YHWH when he says, “Shall we provoke the Lord to jealousy (parazēloumen)? Are we stronger than he?” (1 Cor. 10:22). ( | 5 comments)