Jesus
Real theological thinking:
My friend Wes recently sent me this quotation from Henri Nouwen:Real theological thinking, which is thinking with the mind of Christ, is hard to find in the practice of the ministry. Without solid theological reflection, future leaders will be little more than pseudo-psychologists, pseudo-...
(6 Sep. 2010)
Dunn, Hurtado, and the worship of Jesus:
There should be a copy of J.D.G. Dunn’s Did the First Christians Worship Jesus? waiting for me when I next get back to the UK. In the meantime, I have been reading Larry Hurtado’s polemical essay-length review of the book, which contributes to the ongoing and mostly courteous...
(25 Jul. 2010)
The kingdom of God: not ‘now and not yet’:
It is a commonplace of Reformed and evangelical theology that the kingdom of God is ‘now and not yet’. In one sense it has already arrived; in another sense it hasn’t. According to Wikipedia the argument goes back to the Princeton Calvinist theologian Gerhardus Vos. Some sort of...
(11 Jul. 2010)
Jesus past and present:
I have been engaged in a very constructive conversation with Derek Flood about ‘Penal substitution and the OT narrative of judgment’. My argument has been roughly that in order to understand who Jesus was, what his intentions were, and in this particular case how his suffering might be...
(29 Jun. 2010)
Did Jesus act as though he thought he was God?:
Following my post on the question of whether Jesus claimed to be God it was (indirectly) suggested to me that Jesus may have communicated his sense of divine identity through his actions rather than through his words. Despite popular assumptions to the contrary, Jesus’ miracles in themselves...
(29 Jun. 2010)
Did Jesus claim to be God?:
In his little book Is God a Delusion? Nicky Gumble (‘the pioneer of the Alpha course’) addresses Richard Dawkins’ claim that ‘There’s no good, historical evidence that Jesus ever thought he was divine’ (79-80, 127-131). It’s an old debate, of course, and...
(27 Jun. 2010)
The prayer of the good man Jesus for the church:
In his disappointing and underachieving book The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Philip Pullman has a disillusioned Jesus pray to the emptiness in Gethsemane. There are no miracles, no healings, no answers to prayer – he cannot keep making promises that God never fulfils. There...
(20 May. 2010)
Who was Jesus?:
Here’s an extraordinary insight into the historical Jesus from an ancient source that is unquestionably independent of the Gospels. The historian Josephus, writing a few years after the disastrous Jewish uprising against Roman occupation, describes Jesus as a rustic from the provinces who...
(12 May. 2010)
Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity: the fourth question about Jesus:
Question number four is ‘The Jesus Question’. The previous section had concluded with the slightly illogical assertion that our evolving understanding of God must terminate in Jesus as the Word of God. But McLaren recognizes that we still have to make it clear which Jesus we are talking...
(11 Mar. 2010)
The punishment of Jesus:
I wonder if we’re right to be quite so leery of the punishment aspect of the cross. I guess a lot of it has to do with not wanting to attribute vindictiveness, cruelty to God. Jesus’ death was an anticipation of the punishment of Israel – I suggest in my book on Romans that in Romans 8:...
(28 Jan. 2010)
