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.

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In the last post on “The begotten Son and the subordinate woman” I argued that the Father-Son language in the New Testament belongs, pretty much exclusively, to the “central apocalyptic narrative of Jesus’ vocation, obedience, suffering, death, resurrection, exaltation and rule as YHWH’s appointed… ( | 15 comments)
I’m still working on the Trinity and gender question, and I have to say, it still mystifies me that theologians on both sides of the debate will argue that relations between the persons of the Godhead are determinative for relations between man and woman. Egalitarians think that there is no… ( | 40 comments)
The supposed connection between Trinity and gender-equality (or not) has come up for me in a couple of different settings recently. On the one hand, I have been trying to decide whether a statement about the equality of persons in the Godhead has a bearing on Christian Associates’ policy regarding… ( | 9 comments)
Reading Charles Freeman’s no doubt partial account in [amazon:978-1400033805:inline] of the development of Nicene orthodoxy makes you realize, nevertheless, just how entangled with the intellectual and political interests of Christendom the development of Trinitarian thought was. I have argued… ( | 35 comments)
According to the standard evangelical model Jesus died for the sins of the world, and ever since Pentecost the church has proclaimed this “good news” of personal salvation to the world and will continue to do so until Jesus returns. That model is at best a modern theological abstraction. What we… ( | 7 comments)
My friend Dan Steigerwald, who lives in Portland, Oregon, has written an excellent little book called [amazon:978-1494761028:inline]. He takes the view that the church after Christendom is a church in exile and he proposes a missional model based on Jeremiah’s letter to the exiles in Babylon in… ( | 3 comments)
I began reading [amazon:978-0830827480:inline], edited by C. Marvin Pate, on my flight from London to Los Angeles. The thesis of the book is that the Bible is held together by the “paradigmatic story of Israel” and that this story properly counts as a biblical theology. I like the… ( | 3 comments)