It’s a long time since I’ve sung “Abba, Father, let me be yours and yours alone” in public, but it’s the song that is now rather dated, not the sentiment. Evangelical theology is quite insistent on the fact that as Christians, as sons and daughters of the Father, we have the… (
| 2 comments)
In his book Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination and History, Dale Allison puts forward a number of arguments in support of his view that Jesus is presented in the New Testament as an eschatological figure, whose identity and vocation must be explained with reference to Jewish… (
| 11 comments)
I have just discovered that the Kindle edition of The Future of the People of God is now available from Amazon in the US, UK, France and Germany. Thank you, Wipf and Stock. Thank you very much. The one solitary review on amazon.com says: “This book is an examination of Romans through… (
| 4 comments)
The Fall 2010 issue of the Princeton Theological Review has a diverse selection of essays under the general heading of “The Church After Google”. David Congdon and Travis McMaken have a good article on theological blogging that I think is worth making note of: “Theo-Blogging and the Future of… (
| 4 comments)
Roger Olson has just written a characteristically lucid summary of what narrative theology is. I’ll summarize his summary for those who can’t be bothered to go and read it for themselves: narrative theology deals with the whole Bible as a “dramatic account of God’s activity”; all… (
| 5 comments)
One of the arguments raised against the authenticity of the Son of Man sayings—notably by Vielhauer—has been that in the earliest strata of the Gospels “kingdom of God” and “Son of Man” belong to separate strands.1 Since there is little debate about the authenticity of the kingdom of God theme, the… (
| 0 comments)
I don’t like to be so captious, but with all due respect to an excellent scholar, I really can’t believe Ben Witherington means this. I’m in and out of his book Revelation and the End Times at the moment, trying to write a serious review of it for the Evangelical… (
| 22 comments)
I suspect that many of the readers who find their way to this blog have a rather strong aversion to evangelical statements of faith—such as that of the Evangelical Alliance in the UK—probably because they are perceived in this easy-going postmodern age to be crudely propositional and coercive. I am… (
| 14 comments)
I have Ben Witherington’s short book Revelation and the End Times to hand, so I will take the opportunity provided by his discussion of the millennium to outline what seems to me a more coherent, historically grounded understanding of this mystifying thousand year period.… (
| 8 comments)
The modern gospel is the product of an excessive theological preoccupation with the salvation of the individual. It has led generally to the eclipse of scripture as historical narrative—see part 1 and part 2 of this review. But Dan Phillips’ book also illustrates another problem that arises when… (
| 9 comments)
I suggested in part 1 of this review that conventional evangelical or Reformed constructions of the gospel, such as Dan Phillips’ The World-Tilting Gospel, take no account of the Old Testament story of the people of God from Abraham to Antiochus Epiphanes. It is not enough to… (
| 3 comments)
Dan Phillips’ book The World-Tilting Gospel is not a book I would normally read, let alone review. But I like the Pyromaniacs, the book can for now be downloaded free for the Kindle, and it offers another opportunity to try to explain why I think the traditional modern evangelical or… (
| 2 comments)
A couple of comments relating to the reference to “Tartarus” in 2 Peter 2:4…1. The allusion here is to the fallen angels or Watchers of Hellenistic-Jewish apocalyptic tradition (cf. Jude 6; 1 Enoch 6-16). The thought is only that they are kept securely in Tartarus, the place of the… (
| 0 comments)
Responding to some of the recent posts on hell Steven Opp emailed me with a few questions. The first has to do with the motivational value of a doctrine of annihilation. If the Gehenna passages in the New Testament actually refer to temporal judgment on Israel as part of a narrative of… (
| 6 comments)
I argued recently that the New Testament conceives of any life after death in terms of the resurrection of the body and does not entertain the notion that some immaterial part of a person—the “soul”—survives the destruction of the body to be either rewarded in heaven or punished in hell. See “Why… (
| 8 comments)
I keep making the point that the New Testament is a situated theological engagement with the historical narrative of the people of God. As such it is a work both of memory and of imagination: it addresses the present in the light of what has happened and what will happen.
It seems a… (
| 2 comments)
Ben Witherington has taken the trouble to post a couple of comments (here and here) in response to my critique of his argument about Gehenna in his book Revelation and the End Times. He makes four points in defence of his more or less traditional understanding of geenna in the… (
| 3 comments)
The “good news” in the New Testament is really the telling of the whole story, from Jesus’ initial proclamation to Israel through to judgment on the pagan world. But it has been broken down into its component parts. This observation correlates rather well with Scot McKnight’s argument that… (
| 4 comments)
In his new book The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited Scot McKnight starts out by arguing that the “gospel” has to be distinguished from the “plan of salvation” that lies at the heart of modern evangelical theology and preaching. The gospel is not a formula for personal… (
| 12 comments)
The premise of this site is that evangelical theology is in transition and that this transition is driven by some really quite deep tectonic shifts in the way that the evangelical community understands its biblical origins. In simple terms, it amounts to a clash between two paradigms—one that… (
| 7 comments)
Recent comments