Why should a man be thrown into Gehenna for having looked lustfully at a woman?

Ron got in touch to say that he’s persuaded by the argument that Gehenna in Matthew stands for a historical judgment. He can see how this makes good sense of the sayings about anger, hypocrisy, retaliation, and love of enemies, which presuppose a context of conflict and violence. But how is looking at a woman lustfully (Matt. 5:27-30) connected to the war against Rome and the destruction of the temple?

Read time: 7 minutes

Is John Walton right about the “codependent transactionalism” of the people who built the tower of Babel?

John Walton must know a lot more about the Tower of Babel story in Genesis 11:1-9 than I do—it was the subject of his doctoral dissertation, and, of course, he is an eminent Old Testament scholar. Still, I am not persuaded by his argument in a recent Christianity Today article, “Beware Our Tower of Babel,” that the builders were “exploiting a relationship with God”—with the practical application that our own approach to God sometimes “reeks of transactionalism.”

Read time: 8 minutes

A conversation with John Morehead about narrative-historical approaches to the gospel, salvation, hell, and multifaith

I did an interview last week with John Morehead, who directs Multifaith Matters. His organisation aims to provide support for individuals, churches, and organisations doing mission in a pluralistic religious context, so we talked about “narrative-historical approaches to the gospel, salvation, hell and multifaith.” I have to say, this was a bold move on John’s part.

The earthquake and “hell”

A friend rang this morning wanting to know whether the thousands who died, and no doubt are still dying, in the earthquake that devastated the region around Gaziantep and Aleppo last week are now continuing to suffer in some far worse post mortem state of torment or alienation. It may seem the wrong question to be asking in the face of such immense pain and grief, but perhaps we can think of it as a way of opening—fractionally—a theological window on the catastrophe.

Read time: 7 minutes

A trinitarian hermeneutic and how it breaks the New Testament narrative

I have a lot of work to do on hermeneutics in the coming months. One of the books I am reading is Craig Bartholomew’s Introducing Biblical Hermeneutics: A Comprehensive Framework for Hearing God in Scripture (2015), which seems to be both a general introduction to the field and a defence of a trinitarian hermeneutic—that is, reading the scriptures through a trinitarian lens—in particular. Why a trinitarian hermeneutic is so unhelpful for New Testament interpretation is apparent from this statement (I’m reading on Perlego, so I can’t provide the page number, which is very annoying):

The emphasis on perichoresis in trinitarian doctrine… stresses that while all three persons of the Trinity are involved in all their acts, the Father is particularly associated with creation and Israel, the Son with the fulfillment of redemption, and the Spirit with mission.

Read time: 5 minutes

Cleanthes’ “Hymn to Zeus” and the renewal of monotheism

This is an odd two-part post. I came across Cleanthes’ “Hymn to Zeus” in Mike Bird’s Jesus among the gods: Early Christology in the Greco-Roman World. It’s an outstanding early example (third century BC) of the pagan instinct to identify a supreme god who created and now manages the cosmos rationally, by means of his “word.” “In the Stoic sphere,” Bird says, “the Logos was the ubiquity of divine rationality that holds all things together” (131).

Read time: 7 minutes