An instructive parallel to the sheep and goats judgment

The judgment of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25:31-46 is a good test case for how New Testament eschatology works. It is usually read as an account of a final universal judgment, on the assumption that we are still waiting for the Son of Man to come on the clouds of heaven at the end of history.

It is a traditional perspective, deeply embedded in the iconography of Christendom. The judgment scene that forms the third part of the stunning Redemption Triptych (1455-59) by Vrancke van der Stockt, for example, has Christ seated above the clouds of heaven with a couple of angels. In the arch that frames him are scenes drawn from this passage.

Read time: 3 minutes

Why the Lord’s Prayer should be banned in cinemas

The Church of England has been rather taken aback by the refusal of leading cinemas in the UK to screen a video of people, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, reciting the Lord’s Prayer in the run-up to Christmas. The short film, which I find rather moving in its hurried way, is part of a campaign to encourage your average man-or-woman-in-the-cinema to pray.

Read time: 5 minutes

Do the disciples pray to the Lord Jesus in Acts?

In a comment on an old post looking at a review by Larry Hurtado of Dunn’s Did the First Christians Worship Jesus, Marc Taylor maintains that “Dunn’s assertion that certain prayer words are not used in reference to the Lord Jesus is without merit.” He lists four passages in Acts and a handful from Paul and James in support of his claim. The debate is an interesting one. Here I want briefly to review the Acts texts and propose a different model to account for the data.

Read time: 7 minutes

20 reasons for thinking that “Babylon the great” is Rome not Jerusalem

The New Testament is a thoroughly apocalyptic set of documents. I made the point to my friend JR Rozko last night as we walked through Soho that our current narrative theologies place a great deal of emphasis on the story of Israel that culminates in Jesus, but the New Testament has much more to say about the continuation of the story after Jesus. Evangelical narrative theologies are constructed in such a way that they do not rock the theological boat too much. I think that is just inconsistent.

The question, however, is: How far into the future does the projected New Testament narrative reach? There is some willingness to concede that Jesus predicted the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in AD 70. Not many people would agree with me, however, that as the followers of Jesus took their message out into the Greek-Roman world, divine judgment on Rome and the confession of Jesus as Lord by the nations of the empire came into view as a second eschatological horizon.

Read time: 11 minutes

Kingdom and mission. What’s changed since Schweitzer? Not much

Bruce Chilton starts his book Pure Kingdom: Jesus’ Vision of God by noting that at the end of the nineteenth century Albert Schweitzer had come to the realisation that the “kingdom of God” was basically “eschatological”. He had seen the connection between Jesus’ teaching and the literature of early Judaism and had concluded that Jesus must have been talking about the “violent end of the world”—a “cataclysm on a cosmic scale”.

This eschatological interpretation, grounded in a Jewish worldview, was very different from the two prevailing theological understandings of the kingdom of God: on the one hand, that the “kingdom of God” was a reference to an individual’s life after death”; on the other, that it was a “movement of social improvement on earth”.

Read time: 5 minutes

Lead us not into temptation

What does Jesus mean when he teaches his disciples to pray “lead us not into temptation”? In a brief appendix (“Jesus’ Prayer and the War of Worlds”) to his book Pure Kingdom: Jesus’ Vision of God Bruce Chilton aims to define a middle ground between two misunderstandings of the petition. On the one side, there is the popular devotional view, according to which “temptation” means “enticement”: we are to ask God to “keep us from wicked impulses”. On the other side, there is the “scholarly view” that Jesus taught his disciples to pray that they would escape the apocalyptic “testing” or “trial” that would come upon them at the end of the world, which was just around the corner.

Read time: 5 minutes

Tom Wright on religion and politics: the beginning and end of theocracy

The National Secular Society has taken Tom Wright to task for advocating a “cruciform theocracy” that would overcome the prevailing separation of religion and politics in the West. A more detailed summary of Wright’s talk at St Paul’s Cathedral in London a week ago can be found on the Christian Today website, from which I have gleaned the main bullet points of his argument…

Read time: 5 minutes