My friend Dan Steigerwald, who lives in Portland, Oregon, has written an excellent little book called [amazon:978-1494761028:inline]. He takes the view that the church after Christendom is a church in exile and he proposes a missional model based on Jeremiah’s letter to the exiles in Babylon in… (
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I began reading [amazon:978-0830827480:inline], edited by C. Marvin Pate, on my flight from London to Los Angeles. The thesis of the book is that the Bible is held together by the “paradigmatic story of Israel” and that this story properly counts as a biblical theology. I like the… (
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In his discussion of the imperial cult in Paul and the Faithfulness of God Tom Wright notes that Domitian liked to be addressed as dominus et deus (“lord and god”)—a phrase “familiar to readers of John’s gospel” (341).
Domitian was emperor from AD 81-96. He revived the… (
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Reading the New Testament as historical narrative rather than as “Christian theology”—as raw material rather than as over-refined intellectual product—is not a matter of self-contained interpretation. It’s not just about how we understand the text. It’s about how we live with it. If the… (
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I read a couple of old articles this week responding to Scot McKnight’s book [amazon:978-0310492986:inline] from a Reformed perspective: Scot McKnight and the “King Jesus Gospel” 2: Points of Concern by Trevin Wax, and What God Has Joined Together: The Story and Salvation Gospel by Luke… (
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A few days ago I raised some questions about how well the characteristically “neo-Anabaptist” emphasis on the cross as the lens through which we must now view God—he is the “crucified God”, the “Jesus-looking God”—works within the overall narrative of the New Testament.My argument was, on the… (
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This pointed question was posed by Zach Hoag in a brief conversation about Jesus and violence that I was following on Twitter over the new year:Honest Q: Is there tension between the “Jesus-looking God” of neo-anabaptists & the “1st century Jewish Jesus” of the new perspectivists?I am… (
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I haven’t done this before, but it seems a cheap and cheerful way to bring the year to an end. I got the idea from Brian LePort at Near Emmaus. It’s an inexact exercise. I know which posts received the most hits over the last year, but obviously those which went into the vineyard early have earned… (
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The Gospel Coalition has a blog post by Joe Carter: 9 Things You Should Know About Christmas. It’s all fairly trivial stuff: Jesus probably wasn’t born on December 25th, there’s no mention of a donkey in the texts, we don’t know how many wise men there were, Martin Luther disapproved of Santa Claus… (
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The controlling New Testament story about the resurrected Jesus is that he is seated at the right hand of the Father, having received authority to judge and rule over the nations. The thought runs from his words to Caiaphas (Matt. 26:64; Lk. 22:69), through the preaching first of the early church… (
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I am recording a couple of video lectures next week on 1 and 2 Thessalonians. The approach I want to take is to highlight the story that lies behind the two letters, constructed partly from the more or less credible account of Paul’s time in Thessalonica that Luke provides (Acts 17:1… (
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I’m working my way through the first of the two volumes that make up N.T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God. So far it’s all fascinating background stuff about the eschatological narratives of the Pharisees, the philosophies of the Greeks, and the religion and politics of the… (
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I’ve been engaged in a little exercise with some friends rewriting a mission organization’s statement of faith. What I have presented below is my reworking of a rough, more cautious, but actually rather effective first attempt to make “a bit of a narrative out of our core beliefs, rather than… (
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Rob got in touch with a couple of questions about my post on the unbiblical doctrine of hell. My argument is roughly that the language of painful judgment in the New Testament—Gehenna, wailing and gnashing of teeth, violent destruction, etc.—refers not to what happens to individuals after death… (
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I’ve been reading David Neville’s book A Peaceable Hope: Contesting Violent Eschatology in New Testament Narratives in order to review it for the Evangelical Quarterly. Neville sets out the problem he means to address in the opening paragraph:There is a discrepancy at the… (
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According to Mark’s Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples that, as the apocalyptic storyline reaches its climax and the lights start going out over Jerusalem, “they” will see the Son of man coming in clouds (Mk. 13:24-26). But who—or what—are “they”? In A Peaceable Hope: Contesting Violent… (
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Paul Dean is troubled by the inclusion of the word “triumphantly” in the closing sentence of the previous post on The end of narrative for Christians and Jews: “For the church, narrative came to an end triumphantly in the conversion of the empire and was replaced by theology.” He asks: “Why is… (
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The New Testament is an eschatological text. It tells a story, which is essentially a Jewish story about the fulfilment of age-old, deeply held hopes expressed in the Psalms and the prophets. The death and resurrection of Jesus brings that story to some sort of climax, but not to an end. There is… (
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Preparing some lectures on Revelation, I came across Ian Paul’s very helpful introduction to the book in [amazon:978-0281054343:inline]. With Revelation, probably more than with any other New Testament text, it is difficult to deal with its meaning apart from its form. How we… (
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I had a long conversation over the weekend with an Asian friend who is engaged in conflict-resolution projects in her war-torn country. She was particularly interested in the importance of inter-faith conversations and practices, and we got round to talking about the difference between… (
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