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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Douglas Campbell and the wrath of God
A few pages from the end of The Deliverance of God Douglas Campbell appends a rather limp section—less than a page—on the “wrath of God” (929-30). The discussion, admittedly, concludes a chapter examining only Philippians and a smattering of “ancillary’ texts in the light of his re-reading… ( | 3 comments)
Becoming like Jesus—not all that it’s made out to be
I wrote a couple of weeks back about the close and defining connection in Paul’s thought between sonship and the specific theme of suffering and vindication. Paul appears to make a crucial distinction in Romans 8:16-17 between being ‘heirs of God’ (klēronomoi… theou) and being… ()
Postconservative evangelicalism and beyond
I thought I had found a nice new label for myself: a ‘postconservative evangelical’. Roger Olson defines the term in Reformed and Always Reforming: The Postconservative Approach to Evangelical Theology and makes reference to it in a post on NT Wright and the New Perspective. Wright… ( | 2 comments)
Daniel Kirk on Mark 13
Daniel Kirk has been running an excellent series of posts on Mark 13—excellent in the sense that I agree with pretty much everything he says. For convenience I have listed his posts here, starting with the most recent: ( | 1 comment)
Salvation comes a close second
In a chapter in The Deliverance of God exploring the ‘yawning gap between Justification theory’s description of Judaism and the actual nature of of surrounding Judaism’ (124) Douglas Campbell makes the point that by no means all forms of Judaism were preoccupied with matters of… ( | 4 comments)
Resurrection, rapture and relevance
Daniel Levy has posed a couple of questions regarding the thesis of The Coming of the Son of Man. Part of my argument in the book is that much of the language of resurrection refers not to a final and general resurrection of the dead but specifically to the resurrection of the martyrs who… ( | 11 comments)
Prophecy and predetermination
Phil Johnson posted a very brief statement about divine foreknowledge on the Pyromaniacs blog today to the effect that Arminians must ‘deny God’s foreknowledge, thereby nullifying God’s omniscience’. The assumption is basically that if God is omniscient, he must also know the future,… ( | 5 comments)