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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The election of Gentiles
The story of what happened in Pisidian Antioch is well known (Acts 13:13-52). Paul and Barnabas are invited to speak in the synagogue. Paul relates how God chose their fathers, brought them out of Egypt, suffered their folly in the wilderness for forty years, destroyed the “seven nations… ( | 8 comments)
Redefining evangelicalism
Scot McKnight has started working through David Fitch’s massively titled book The End of Evangelicalism? Discerning a New Faithfulness for Mission: Towards an Evangelical Political Theology (Theopolitical Visions). I strongly recommend following him if you’re interested… ( | 4 comments)
Paul's argument about election in Romans 9
I have been trying for a few weeks to write a response to some difficult questions, put to me by a friend, about the Canaanite genocide, hell, election, and the “ludicrous contortions that a Calvinist needed to make in order to explain how God was fair to judge the non elect”. I have come to… ( | 10 comments)
Did Jesus preach to the spirits in prison between his death and resurrection?
Here’s another approach to Easter at an exegetical tangent. This question came up as part of a discussion about the supposed “intermediate state” between death and resurrection. My view is that Jesus died, was dead, and was raised from dead, setting a pattern for all subsequent deaths and… ( | 13 comments)
The resurrection of the sleeping saints from their tombs
What does the peculiar and commonly overlooked incident of the resurrection of the saints at the time of Jesus’ death (Matt. 27:51-53) tell us about the meaning of Easter? From a historical-critical perspective the little story is highly problematic and has had even some more conservative… ( | 16 comments)
Heaven
By comparison with “hell”, which in its traditional sense is not a biblical idea, “heaven” ought to be a fairly straightforward theological concept to explain. Surely heaven is simply what belief in Jesus is ultimately all about? It’s where we go when we die. It’s what makes sitting… ( | 6 comments)
The unbiblical doctrine of “hell”
I set out a while back to write a general piece on the unbiblical doctrine of “hell” as part of a glossary or lexicon of key concepts but got side-tracked. Since then the brouhaha over Rob Bell’s book has prompted extensive reflection on the matter, and it now seems worth providing a rough… ( | 61 comments)