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In a brief exchange with Daniel Kirk about the apocalyptic character of the story that is being told in the New Testament I touched on Jesus’ parable of the two houses, which is found at the end of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 7:24-27). We usually understand this passage as a description of the...
(17th Jan. 2012 | 4 comments)
Today the Blog Tour for Daniel Kirk’s new book Jesus Have I Loved, but Paul? pulls in at Chapter Six: “Women in the Story of God”. In addition to my contribution here, there will be a piece by Julie Clawson, which I am willing to bet will be nothing like as overwrought and self-serving as what...
(16th Jan. 2012 | 9 comments)
Everyone by now must have noticed that there is a large and unsightly crack running down the middle of that highly vocal and energetic sector of Western Christianity that thinks of itself in the broadest sense as “evangelical”. It is not the only fault line—Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Pentecostalism...
(12th Jan. 2012 | 16 comments)
A new book by Daniel Kirk has been released with great fanfare and a star-studded blog tour, to which I will make a contribution next week. The book is called Jesus Have I Loved, But Paul? and is basically an attempt to show that Jesus and Paul are on the same page—or at least on different pages in...
(10th Jan. 2012 | 1 comment)
You are lost in thick fog in open country. You don’t have a compass. You have a map but you have no idea where you are on the map and you can see none of the landmarks—a hilltop, a church spire, a radio mast—that would allow you to get your bearings, triangulate your position, move forward in the...
(9th Jan. 2012 | 8 comments)
Baker Academic is promoting a new series of “ebook shorts” from Robert Gundry by offering his commentary on Ephesians as a free download for a period of 24 hours on Monday 9th January. You can get it from Amazon, CBD and Barnes and Noble. This is what the publisher says about the series:
In these...
(8th Jan. 2012 | 3 comments)
There was a man who had two sons. The older son loved to tell stories and would keep the relatives and servants that made up his father’s household enthralled for hours with his repertoire of tales—not all of them believable—from the family’s eventful history. The younger son was of a much more...
(3rd Jan. 2012 | 8 comments)
This is one of the passages often cited in support of a theology of “spiritual warfare”—an activity popularly understood as one in which Christians engage in combat with satan and his cohorts through prayer, exorcism, and aggressive proclamation of the Word of God. It is not my intention here to...
(2nd Jan. 2012 | 1 comment)
My argument about the historical frame of the Christmas stories and of Simeon’s prayer in particular has been subjected to sustained criticism by Peter Wilkinson, who is certain that at least in the latter case there is reference to the salvation of the nations.Since Peter is unconvinced by the...
(28th Dec. 2011 | 0 comments)
One more quick post in the mad rush before Christmas. I want to clarify my reasons for thinking that Simeon is not speaking about the salvation of Gentiles when he speaks of God’s salvation as “a light for revelation to nations” (Lk. 2:30-32).It is tempting initially to read this as an allusion to...
(23rd Dec. 2011 | 1 comment)
My Kindle book Hell and Heaven in Narrative Perspective is selling like hot mince pies on Amazon, which is quite a bit less than hot cakes but much more festive. Can you think of a better way to make a loved one very happy at Christmas for just $3.29 (or the equivalent in pounds and euros)? One...
(23rd Dec. 2011 | 6 comments)
The true meaning of Christmas—as a Christian rather than a pagan celebration—is represented in the popular imagination most commonly by the serene tableau of the radiant baby Jesus in a manger, surrounded by his parents, a few inquisitive cherubs, rustic shepherds, and resplendent wise men,...
(21st Dec. 2011 | 11 comments)
It’s taken me a little while to get round to responding to a comment by Al Shaw regarding my argument that the main storyline of the New Testament effectively culminates in Constantine. Al writes:
One of my areas of concern is that you appear (to my mind) to place too high a view of the...
(19th Dec. 2011 | 8 comments)
I will be attending a small conference on Douglas Campbell’s The Deliverance of God later this week at King’s College London, and I lugged my copy of his monstrous book all the way from Dubai with a view to doing some necessary revision. Unfortunately, I have also just acquired a copy of Marcus...
(14th Dec. 2011 | 2 comments)
We went to see Surviving Progress last night at the Dubai International Film Festival. Based on Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress, this powerful Canadian documentary argues that humanity has got itself stuck in a global “progress trap”. The fundamental problem is that we are running...
(9th Dec. 2011 | 6 comments)
I have collected together most of the stuff that I have posted on this site on the subject of “hell” and life after death in a new Kindle book called Hell and Heaven in Narrative Perspective. Much of it was prompted by the controversy surrounding Rob Bell’s book Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell...
(7th Dec. 2011 | 14 comments)
This is the second of two questions about annihilationism. The first had to do with the origins of the argument that the “hell” language in the New Testament refers not to suffering after death but to historical events interpreted as divine judgment, which could be quite unpleasant enough enough....
(1st Dec. 2011 | 32 comments)
A couple of questions were sent to me recently regarding my view on “hell”. I have blogged far more than I ever intended to on the subject over the last year, mainly because Rob Bell’s Love Wins put the Emergent cat among the excitable Reformed pigeons. I take a rather distinctive line on the...
(30th Nov. 2011 | 6 comments)
I listened to a gospel sermon at a church in one of the labour camps yesterday by a pastor I greatly respect. He retold the story of the prodigal son, with an acceptable measure of poetic licence, along the way developing his basic evangelistic paradigm. Even with the handicap of translation, it...
(26th Nov. 2011 | 11 comments)
The participants in any specific execution played scripted roles within this collective fable of Roman power. Specifically, the officers overseeing the execution played the part of Caesar’s legions, while the victim represented the larger social group of which he was a member. Applied to the case...
(23rd Nov. 2011 | 2 comments)
