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).

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A quiz on the atonement (in narrative-historical perspective)
The day before Good Friday seems a fitting time to launch a narrative-historical alternative to Tim Challies’ thoroughly Reformed Quiz on the Atonement. Well, not quite an alternative, more a commentary on the standard Reformed account of the significance of Jesus’ death. There are 33… ()
Jesus’ parable of the wicked tenants: an exercise in narrative-historical hermeneutics
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Having critiqued Owen Strachan’s defence of the atonement doctrine, it seems only fair to examine a thesis from the anti-substitutionary camp. My friend Scott pointed me to Chuck Queen’s combative essay on the Baptist News site: “It’s time to end the hands-off attitude to substitionary atonement”.… ( | 7 comments)
Stories about Jesus: how they fit together, and what he means for us today
Theology has always had a “narrative” shape to it. The problem with propositional or systematic theologies is not that they are non-narrative but that they have reduced the dense historical narrative of scripture to a bare sequence of cosmic-level events: creation → fall → redemption →… ( | 11 comments)
A commentary on Owen Strachan’s less than biblical defence of the atonement
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How Paul made up what was lacking in Christ’s afflictions
One of the passages that crops up in discussions of what Paul meant when he talked about being conformed to or transformed into the image of Christ—and to whom that language applied—is Colossians 1:24. Davo mentioned it in a comment recently, and I have been meaning to get back to it.The ESV… ( | 1 comment)