Why Jesus? Which Jesus?

The little book Why Jesus? is part of the materials for the Alpha Course. In it, Nicky Gumbel writes:

Jesus is the only man who has ever chosen to be born, and he is one of the few who has chosen to die. He said that the entire reason for his coming was to die for us. He came ‘to give his life as a ransom for many’ (Mark 10:45).

To say that Jesus is “the only man who has ever chosen to be born” is faintly ridiculous even on high christological terms. The only possible New Testament support for it is the idea expressed in Philippians 2:6 that he did not grasp at a certain type of being equal to God or a god, my views on which can be found here.

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The Spirit of prophecy and renewal
Westbourne Grove Church, which I help to lead, is part of the Forge Sphere of churches in the south of England, which used to be part of Salt & Light, which is a network of “neocharismatic Evangelical” churches associated with the British New Church Movement. ()
The parable of the rich man and Lazarus and the tale of Khamwas and Si-Osire
This is really just for fun. I was wondering whether to preach about wealth inequality next Sunday, but this is as far as I got. Jesus tells a quite elaborate story about an unnamed rich man and a poor man called Lazarus. One early manuscript gives the rich man the name Neuēs. ()
BNTS conference presentation: In the Form of One of the Pagan Gods
I was at the British New Testament Society conference this week, held at the magnificent St Patrick’s Pontifical University, Maynooth, in Ireland. This is the paper that I presented in the Divine Christology in Paul’s Letters session. It is a slightly updated summary of my argument in In… ( | 1 comment)
Speaking words of wisdom
I suspect that “fake news” is a piece of trashy political sloganeering that will blow away when the wind next changes direction. But the larger picture is troubling: digital technologies, in different ways, on different levels, are undermining our sense of what is real. Katherine Viner wrote in the… ()
The “voice of a god” and the “form of a god”
I think that something quite straightforward is going on when Paul writes that Jesus was en morphē theou—literally, “in form of god” (Phil. 2:6). English translations usually render this “in the form of God” or perhaps something like “in the nature of God.” But if there’s one thing that… ( | 2 comments)
What can we learn from “urban monasticism”?
In the Christian West, in the pre-modern world, the parish church met the religious needs of people living in the parish. It was necessitated by and sustained by a culture that had been in place, in one form or another, since the conversion of the Roman Empire under Constantine and his… ()
Between Jesus and Paul: where did it all go right?
The relationship between Jesus and Paul is much disputed. You will often hear people say that Paul turned the generous, kind, and progressive religion of Jesus into a monstrous theological and ecclesiastical system from which we are still recovering. Or that Jesus died for our sins and Paul told… ( | 14 comments)