The groaning of creation

We screened the People’s Emergency Briefing film in the week before this message, so the climate crisis loomed menacingly. In the film, Jennifer Saunders of Absolutely Fabulous fame asks a good question: “What’s the matter with us?” What is the matter with us as a civilisation?

There is no eco-crisis in the New Testament, but we often read Romans 8:19-21 as an expression of Paul’s conviction that the whole of creation will eventually be set free from the consequences of the fall of humanity.

I think that misses the historical point.

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Keep telling the story, despite God and despite ourselves
I spent a very enjoyable day last Saturday listening to Lloyd Pietersen talking to a mostly Anabaptist audience about his book [amazon:978-0836196177:inline]. One of the strong points that he makes in the book and made in the conference is that we have to take the biblical narrative as it is, warts… ( | 10 comments)
What do we mean when we say that Jesus is Lord?
The “gospel” today comes in two main user-friendly varieties. There is a “hard” version, which says that we are sinners subject to wrath, but Jesus died for our sins so that we may have eternal life with God. And there is a “soft” version, which says simply, with a big smile, that God is love. For… ( | 11 comments)
Daniel Meeter: Why Be A Christian (If No One Goes to Hell)?
Daniel Meeter has written an elegant, lucid, sensible, and humane book about hell and, as far as I am concerned, gets most of it right. The basic argument of Why Be A Christian (If No One Goes to Hell)? (Shook Foil Books, 2012) is that the “Bible does not teach that anyone spends eternity… ()
In the likeness of sinful flesh
Last week it was Romans 9:5 and the question of whether Paul says that the Christ is “God over all, blessed forever”. Since then I have been fretting over Paul’s account of Christ’s self-emptying and vindication in Philippians 2:6-11. I am working on a paper developing an idea about the… ( | 4 comments)
Does Paul say that Jesus is God in Romans 9:5?
I have been puzzling over Romans 9:5—a notorious interpretive crux, as scholars like to say. Is this a rare place in the New Testament where it is stated that Jesus is God? This is how the ESV takes it: They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of… ( | 111 comments)
Scot McKnight on the historical Jesus and the Jesus of the church
Scot McKnight argues that historical Jesus studies must start from the premise that the “church either got Jesus wrong or said too much”, that the “real” Jesus of the historians and the theologized Jesus of the church cannot be reconciled, and that historical Jesus studies are of no use to the… ( | 20 comments)
Some notes on discipleship
I have the opportunity to do some teaching on discipleship later in the week at a Christian Associates staff conference in Scotland. This rather lengthy piece is part of my preparation. I have tried to outline how I see discipleship functioning in scripture, with particular attention given to the… ( | 6 comments)