The merry-go-round of the debate between Scot McKnight and Matthew Bates, as exponents of a “King Jesus” gospel, and Greg Gilbert, representing a more traditional Reformed emphasis on justification by faith, continues to spin noisily. Gilbert has issued a response to the criticism he received from McKnight and Bates, Michael Bird leans towards McKnight and Bates, as does Michael Mercer, and Jackson Wu seems to think that it’s a both/and situation. No doubt others have had something to say. [Indeed, others have had something to say.]

Matthew Bates will think I’ve got it in for him, but that’s not the case. I love the direction he is moving in. I just don’t think he’s taking the journey seriously enough. He has a piece on Scot McKnight’s Jesus Creed blog asking whether Together for the Gospel and The Gospel Coalition are shifting their ground on the meaning of “gospel”. It’s an interesting question. He sees signs of a new emphasis on Jesus’ kingship, somewhat displacing an older “God-man-Christ-response version of the gospel”. In the course of the article, however, Bates offers his own quite substantial definition of the “true biblical gospel”, and I couldn’t resist the temptation to appraise it.

Peter asks a question that gets right to the heart of my attempt to follow the historical narrative of scripture through to our own time. This is exactly the sort of conundrum that a consistently developed narrative-historical method throws up—and, I think, solves:

I don’t mean any disrespect, and maybe I’m just not understanding your view, but it feels like you are trying to rescue Jesus or at least rescue the Church. But either way, it paints a picture of a weak ruler. If Jesus became Lord almost 2000 years ago but was overthrown by the Enlightenment, is he really king of kings and lord of lords? Or did he abdicate the throne?

This is the best theological reflection on coronavirus that I have read so far. It’s a Jesuit Review essay by Tomáš Halík, who is a Catholic priest and a professor of sociology at Charles University, Prague. It offers something of the prophetic perspective that is missing from much of the bland and frankly sub-biblical evangelical commentary that I have come across. It has a distinctly Catholic point of view, but most of what he says has relevance for the whole church. It’s not a very long essay, but I’ll summarise what seem to me the main points.

In a Seven Minute Seminary video on the will of God and natural disasters Ben Witherington, who is a very good biblical scholar, argues emphatically that COVID-19 is not an “act of God”.

One of the main tasks of Jesus’ earthly ministry, he says, was to get rid of disease, decay, and death so it is “hardly likely that we should predicate of God something that Jesus came to correct.” God is not the author of disease decay and death, we are, all the way back to Adam and Eve. Natural disasters are part of the fallen world. Disease, decay and death are what God wishes to overcome; the last enemy to be overcome is death. So we should be “extremely wary of suggesting that, well, God sent all of this to us” as punishment. Besides, if that really were the case, we would have to say that God doesn’t have a very good aim, killing Christians and non-Christians alike.

My wife thinks this is rather heavy reading for Easter, so be warned….

The doctrine of “penal substitutionary atonement”—the idea that God punished Jesus on Good Friday in our place—divides Christians: some find it theologically profound, others find it morally repugnant. My argument has been—see, for example, my recent post on the reconciliation of all things—that, however the doctrine strikes us as moderns, it makes good sense in the context of the New Testament story about Israel. And only in that context. I’ve suggested that Paul’s statement about God putting forward Jesus as a hilastērion by his blood in Romans 3:25 fits this pattern.

A popular text for people who would like to think that in the end all people will be saved is the assertion in Colossians 1:19-20 that through Christ God was pleased to “reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.” Steve Chalke, for example, whose book The Lost Message of Paul I have been working through, quotes Karl Barth: “I don’t believe in universalism, but I do believe in Jesus Christ, the reconciler of all.” I have to say that the “brilliant” subtlety of Barth’s solution to the question of who gets saved is lost on me, but I can see the appeal of Paul’s statement: it suggests that ultimately the whole cosmos is reconciled to God because Jesus died. Is that a valid understanding of the passage? I don’t think so.