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I recently did a long and enjoyable interview with Sean Finnegan, talking about my book In the Form of a God: The Pre-existence of the Exalted Christ in Paul. Sean is lead pastor of Living Hope Community Church near Albany, New York, and… ( | 2 comments)
Romans 5:1-6:23
Let’s remind ourselves, first, that in these chapters Paul has been recapitulating a dialogue with the Jews of the diaspora, for the most part about the Jews of the diaspora. They have failed to provide a benchmark… ( | 3 comments)
One obvious retort to the argument that Paul allows for the existence of unbelieving righteous Gentiles who will be justified on the basis of their good deeds on the day of God’s wrath is that he goes on to state emphatically, quoting the… ( | 1 comment)
I have finally got round to reading John Barclay’s highly esteemed Paul and the Gift, and he almost persuaded me to change my mind about the identity of the Gentiles who do not have the Law but do what the law requires (Rom. 2:14).I have… ()
Romans 3:1-4:25
As an apostle of the gospel of God concerning his Son, Paul has argued so far that the Greek-Roman world, as he has encountered it in the course of his missionary journeys from Antioch to Athens, faces a day of God’s wrath or… ()
Romans 1:19-2:29Why does good news need to be heard regarding the “power of God for salvation”? Why does God have to justify himself by ensuring that the righteous person lives because of faith or faithfulness?The reason is that “the wrath of God is… ( | 6 comments)
Jesus tells a rather disturbing story about the judgment of his people at the end of the age of second temple Judaism. This is my very functional translation:
Again, the kingdom of the heavens is like a dragnet (sagēnēi) thrown into the… ()
Romans 1:1-18
Paul, apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ (1:1-7)
Paul introduces himself to those in Rome who are “called to be saints” as a slave of Christ and an apostle, “set apart for the gospel of God.”
The “gospel” is the proclamation of good… ( | 7 comments)
I take several chapters in my book In the Form of a God: The Pre-existence of the Exalted Christ in Paul to argue that in the first part of the Christ encomium in Philippians 2:6-11 the direction of travel is ontologically flat:… ( | 3 comments)
Christians who think that it is right and good to maintain a form a patriarchy, at least in church and home, will often argue that by naming the woman Adam exercises or asserts an innate, creational authority over her that is not abrogated… ( | 2 comments)
John says that Isaiah saw the glory of Jesus (Jn. 12:41). Is this a reference back to the “glory” of God that Isaiah saw in the temple? Or is it something else? Well, I’m going to say that it was something else, not because I’m anti-trinitarian but… ()
I have been working through Craig Keener’s Spirit Hermeneutics: Reading Scripture in Light of Pentecost (2016) to prepare some teaching materials on Pentecostal hermeneutics. It’s a fairly casual read, so far at least. I could really do… ()
In an article on the Gospel Coalition website, adapted from a book about evangelism, Matt Smethurst attempts to explain the gospel. He suggests, to begin with, that we can view the gospel from two perspectives: a high level or aerial view, which… ( | 11 comments)
Stephen Fowl thinks that it’s impossible to get from history to theology—to start with historical-criticism and arrive at an account of the being and intentions of the Triune God and of the various beliefs and practices that derive from that core… ()
This is a brief re-examination of Thomas’ famous declaration “My Lord and my God” in John 20:28. I looked at this some years ago, noting the common argument that the wording of the confession reflects the “custom,” recorded in Suetonius and Dio… ( | 7 comments)
Probably, for most people interested in biblical studies, “historicism” is a bad word, associated either with a positivist historical-critical methodology that hammers the theological life out of a text or with a certain mode of nineteenth century… ( | 4 comments)
I did a couple of podcast episodes recently with David Capes for The Stone Chapel Podcasts, talking about my book In the Form of a God: The Pre-existence of the Exalted Christ in Paul.
Episode 140 “In the Form of A God” with Andrew… ()
It is easy to visualise the traditional interpretation of Philippians 2:6-11 as a downward parabola or u-bend: Christ existed in heaven from eternity “in the form of God”; he descended into the world, becoming man and dying on the cross; then he is… ( | 13 comments)
This is a dull, and frankly unnecessary, technical note on the genitive construction with a preposition en morphēi theou (ἐν μορφῇ θεοῦ) in Philippians 2:6. I’ve had to look at this a bit more closely following a rather disjointed… ( | 12 comments)
John Baumberger has a question about my translation of en morphē theou in Philippians 2:6 as “in the form of a god.” He takes issue with the indefinite construction on a couple of grounds:
1. The word theos ‘without the definite… ( | 5 comments)
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