In an excellent interview on the Protestant Libertarian Podcast about his book Jesus and His Promised Second Coming: Jewish Eschatology and Christian Origins (2024), Tucker Ferda uses the expression “process eschatology” to register the fact that in Jewish apocalyptic writings the “end” is generally conceived not as a single event but as a series of events. More often in the book we have the phrase “eschatological process.” That seems to me quite an interesting idea to explore.
I was asked how I understood the reference to “firstfruits” in the New Testament. It’s a rather obscure topic perhaps, but a bit of word study won’t go amiss and may shed some light on the eschatological narrative.In case you’re not familiar with my idiosyncratic way of reading the New Testament,… ( | 2 comments)
I was recommended Tim Keller’s book Generous Justice: How God’s Grace Makes Us Just as preparatory reading for a sermon at Crossroads International Church in the Hague this coming weekend. It’s a compassionate, practical, carefully argued, and in some ways quite audacious exhortation to… ( | 14 comments)
In an article on the Christianity Today website Ed Stetzer dismisses the doom-sayers and gloom-mongers who think that the church is in terminal decline and puts forward five fundamentals for an evangelical future. I am of a naturally cheerful disposition, but I think his analysis and proposals are… ( | 10 comments)
Daniel Hoffman makes an important point about my argument that salient events in the history of the church could be said to have the same level of theological significance as events in the Bible:I sympathize with this in theory—it sounds right, but it seems to me the obvious difference, at least as… ( | 6 comments)
A friend sent me a link to a short talk by Tom Wright in which he explains his now quite well known five act play model of biblical authority. There are two further parts to the talk on reading the scriptures as narrative and on how the church can improvise its own narrative. I recommend it. I… ( | 5 comments)
The three stories told in Luke 15 about something or someone that is lost and then found are not about us, were not addressed to us, were not written for us. They are certainly not vehicles of a universal evangelistic message about lost sinners who need to be saved by the atoning death of Jesus and… ()
I have to prepare some material about discipleship for a small leaders’ retreat. The approach I want to take is to frame discipleship narrative-historically. No surprises there. One way to do this is to take a very practical letter with strong discipleship content, such as 1… ( | 5 comments)
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