David has provided a very nice commentary on my previous post about the resurrection of Jesus on the third day. He has made it clear that he gets the main contention about the historical framing: “Too often we read the New Testament as if it dropped out of the sky rather than emerging from a real story, rooted in Israel and moving outward into the world.” But he pushes back at a number of points. He insists that the resurrection of Jesus in the New Testament is treated not merely as a moment in Jewish history but as an event of universal human significance. I have highlighted his main concerns and responded.
I’ve put this up for a couple of reasons. First, I’m pulling together some ideas for teaching on Acts at a mission conference in the summer, and a rough narrative outline is a good place to start, though how much use I’ll make of it remains to be seen.
Secondly, someone got in touch recently… ( | 6 comments)
I argued in a couple of posts recently that Jesus’ apocalyptic discourse in Matthew 24 has reference exclusively to the siege of Jerusalem, the destruction of the temple, and the significance of this catastrophe for Jesus’ disciples. I maintain, in agreement with Dick France on this point, that the… ( | 5 comments)
In a comment on my recent post It’s not eschatology, folks, it’s just a story Ian Paul kindly took me to task for not consulting Dick France’s commentary on Matthew. I used his commentary on Mark when writing The Coming of the Son of Man, but the Matthew commentary came out a couple of… ( | 1 comment)
I spent some time with the staff of a church in south London this week talking about “eschatology”. Which is half the problem. As long as we treat eschatology as a more or less independent sub-section of—or worse, appendix to—our general theology, we have no frame of reference, nowhere to anchor it… ( | 23 comments)
In order to keep my knee-jerk prejudices against certain aspects of traditional evangelical theology in good working order I have been reading [amazon:978-1433531620:inline], edited by Grudem, Collins and Schreiner. What I have been looking for is examples of how theologians really don’t get… ( | 9 comments)
There is a simple, universal or cosmic or existential narrative of the cross—the horizontal beam. Humanity has fallen, every individual person has sinned and must go by way of the cross to gain eternal life. But, for all its merits, this is a theological abstraction. It is not the biblical… ( | 3 comments)
I’ll make this my last post on Bird, et al.’s lively—bordering on manic—response to Bart Ehrman’s book [amazon:978-0061778186:inline]. Chris Tilling is a good friend, so I need to tread a little carefully here. His argument is based largely on his published PhD thesis [amazon:978-3161518652:inline… ( | 9 comments)
Recent comments