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how to tell the biblical story in a way that makes a difference

If the Bible is history, what are we supposed to do?

20 March, 2019 - 10:07 | Andrew Perriman

Austin asks: “How do we know what the creator God wants from us if the Scriptures are history for us and we’re not looking forward to ‘the day of Christ’? What are some practical ways of living this out? How do we interact with those of differing faiths?” Here is a quick list of practical things that we might do—an agenda for a renewed biblical (rather than cultural or political) evangelicalism, let us say. Let me know if I’ve missed anything important.

18 Mar 2019
The salvation of the Jews by the “Author of life”—not quite in the way you might think

Here’s an interesting question. What are we to understand by the phrase “Author of life” in the ESV translation of Acts 3:15? Since we would normally say that God as creator is the author of life, we might imagine that Peter is saying, in this very early defence of the apostolic witness,...
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14 Mar 2019
Testing times: a narrative framework for the renewal of the Western church

What I say is: a narrative theology ought to be able to account for the whole experience of the people of God, not just the beginning, middle, and end of it. We may give some sort of priority to the early biblical sections of the narrative, but the story doesn’t stop with the events of the New Testament—...
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26 Feb 2019
Another reason to think that Isaiah’s suffering servant is the generation of Jews which grew up in Babylon

Whoever finally redacted Isaiah 40-55 saw fit to insert or leave the passage about the suffering servant between a promise concerning the redemption of Jerusalem and the return of the exiles (Is. 52:1-12) and the assurance that the ruined city would be abundantly repopulated: “the children of the desolate one will...
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7 Feb 2019
About whom does the prophet say this?

In the famous “servant song” of Isaiah 52:13-53:12 the prophet describes a person who has suffered punishment because of the sins of Israel, and whose sufferings have had some sort of redemptive effect:

But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the...
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1 Feb 2019
Who will recline at table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven?

The Canaanite woman in Matthew’s story got the leftovers from the table at which the “children” of the household of Israel were being fed. She had no right to sit at the table, nor was any such right promised to her or her daughter; and it is clear that Jesus found her a distraction.

The earlier encounter...
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26 Jan 2019
What did it mean to “see” the coming of the Son of Man in clouds?

When Jesus says that some people will “see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory” (Mk. 13:26), does he mean this literally—picking up on a recent comment? Does he expect people to look up to the sky and actually see a human figure descending to earth on a cloud, like Mary Poppins?

...
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21 Jan 2019
Why was Jesus so polite to the centurion and so rude to the Canaanite woman?

The story of the Canaanite woman (Matt. 15:21-28; cf. Mk. 7:24-30) has been going round in my head the last few days, partly because I have been marking a number of undergraduate essays comparing the two versions of the episode, partly because I happened across quite a good podcast in which Trevin Wax and Brandon...
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10 Jan 2019
Stephen Burnhope: Atonement and the New Perspective

One of the main arguments that I have been putting forward on this site is that modern evangelicalism needs to shift its weight from the rickety stool of theology or dogmatics, before it collapses, to the much more solid and reliable stool of history. What would this mean for how we understand things? First, we...
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