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.

So no surprise that the Forge summer camp at beautiful Ashburnham Place in East Sussex had some serious charismatic energy to it, boosted by rumours of a “quiet revival.”

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Brant Pitre on the Son of Man and Jesus’ divine identity
I have been working through Brant Pitre’s rather too methodical and, in my view, tendentious (I know, the pot calling the kettle black) Jesus and Divine Christology, in which he makes a case for reading divine identity into certain of the words and deeds of Jesus. ()
Why do you ask me about the good?
One of the supposed “riddles” discussed in the previous post was Jesus’ saying “No one is good except God alone.” In a comment, Gerard Jay makes the point that Matthew shifts the emphasis from the questionable goodness of Jesus to the unquestionable goodness of the Law—from the person to the action. ( | 1 comment)
Brant Pitre on the riddles of Jesus’ divinity
It is Brant Pitre’s argument in Jesus and Divine Christology that the intrinsic divinity of Jesus is revealed in the Gospels either through actions and events or through certain cryptic sayings. His divinity is a secret, a hidden reality, that may sometimes be glimpsed breaking through… ( | 3 comments)
The transfiguration of Jesus: what exactly is revealed?
The third “epiphany miracle,” after the two sea miracles, is the transfiguration or “metamorphoses” (metemorphēthē) of Jesus in the presence of Peter, James, and John, on the mountain. ()
What the walking on the water business is really all about
The second “epiphany miracle” discussed by Brant Pitre in his book Jesus and Divine Christology is Jesus walking on the water (Matt. 14:22-33; Mk. 6:45-52; Jn. 6:16-21). ( | 3 comments)
Brant Pitre on the epiphany miracles: the stilling of the storm
Chapter two of Jesus and Divine Christology is about the “epiphany miracles.” Brant Pitre states the main purpose of the chapter quite bluntly: it is to “demolish the modern scholarly myth… that Jesus is not depicted as divine in the Synoptic Gospels” (40).There are three such miracles:… ()
Brant Pitre: are the charges of blasphemy evidence that Jesus claimed to be divine?
I have just started reading Brant Pitre’s Jesus and Divine Christology (2024), in which he sets out to show that the earliest Jewish followers of Jesus believed he was divine because “Jesus himself spoke and acted as if he were divine during his lifetime”—only he did so in a very Jewish… ( | 5 comments)