The little book Why Jesus? is part of the materials for the Alpha Course. In it, Nicky Gumbel writes:

Jesus is the only man who has ever chosen to be born, and he is one of the few who has chosen to die. He said that the entire reason for his coming was to die for us. He came ‘to give his life as a ransom for many’ (Mark 10:45).

To say that Jesus is “the only man who has ever chosen to be born” is faintly ridiculous even on high christological terms. The only possible New Testament support for it is the idea expressed in Philippians 2:6 that he did not grasp at a certain type of being equal to God or a god, my views on which can be found here.

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Daniel Levy has written a very good, thorough, and largely sympathetic (quizzical in places rather than critical) review of The Coming of the Son of Man. He took the trouble to raise some questions with me in advance regarding the “rapture”, to which I responded in “Resurrection,… ()
Some prominent scholars (so far Thomas Schreiner and Craig Blomberg) have been posting their views regarding the much debated translation of pistis Christou in Galatians 2:16 on the new BibleGateway translation forum. I think the debate is important, but not as important as the underlying… ()
Jim Hoag has a couple of pertinent questions about my “Postconservative evangelicalism and beyond” post—pertinent, in fact, to the point that he makes me wonder whether the piece had much in the way of substance to it at all. The first question has to do with what we understand by the “New… ( | 4 comments)
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)
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… ()
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 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)