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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It is a basic error of modern evangelicalism that it has over-compressed the biblical narrative in order to provide a simple, user-friendly “gospel” for the practical purposes of personal evangelism, pastoral instruction, and the highly subjective forms of worship that prevail in our churches. My… ( | 16 comments)
This is a close examination of the place of Romans 3:24-25 in Paul’s argument about the fate of the Jews in chapter 3 as a whole. It is a response to objections made to my post on atonement that when Paul speaks here of a redemption in Christ Jesus, etc., he does not discriminate… ( | 2 comments)
At the simplest level what we mean by “atonement” is that Jesus died for my sins in order to reconcile me to a holy God. But when the church attempts to explain how Jesus’ death on the cross does this, we quickly find ourselves entangled in a number of competing theories: the… ( | 17 comments)
There is no question that Pentecost is a “wondrous and challenging feast”, which should put “to the lie a lazy, sleepy, hidden, and tepid Christian life”. I quote from a Meditation on the Feast of Pentecost by Msgr. Charles Pope of the Archdiocese of Washington. But the Monsignor then sharpens the… ( | 2 comments)
My very good friends Rogier and Christine have responded to my post Kingdom of God: who, what, when, and how? with a number of pertinent questions. I have tried to answer all of them thoroughly, but the result is a rather long post. So if your name is not Rogier or Christine, you may want to… ( | 10 comments)
At the heart of Jesus’ preaching is the simple statement that “the kingdom of God is at hand”, to which an equally simple exhortation is attached: repent and believe this good news (Mk. 1:15). Simple? Perhaps not. We appear still to be remarkably confused about what Jesus meant. Is the kingdom… ( | 3 comments)
I’m picking my way slowly through the beguiling, breezy woodland of Rob Bell’s Love Wins. But to be honest, so far I have been more interested in the trees than the wood. If you look at some of them close up, with the slightly obsessive eye of a botanist rather than the casual… ( | 6 comments)