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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Numbered with the transgressors
John Piper argues that the quotation of Isaiah 53:12 in Luke 22:37 is evidence that Jesus saw himself as the righteous servant who would ‘make many to be accounted righteous, and… bear their iniquities’ (Is. 53:11): ‘So in the Gospel of Luke, the way Jesus saves is by shedding his blood and… ()
Mark Van Steenwyk and the inferiority of Christianity
I like this provocative and nicely weighted take on Christian imperialism, ancient and modern, by Mark Van Steenwyk at The Jesus Manifesto. He makes the point that the Christianity we have inherited – even if we regard ourselves as dissenters – is the product of imperialism in one form or another,… ()
John Piper and the gospels of Jesus and Paul
In a sermon given at a recent ‘Together for the Gospel Conference’ John Piper asks the question, ‘Did Jesus Preach the Gospel of Evangelicalism?’ – by which he means, in effect, ‘Did Jesus Preach Paul’s Gospel?’ His expressed concern is with the argument of critical scholarship ‘that Jesus’… ( | 6 comments)
Richard Bauckham and the Western Christian tradition (briefly)
Reading through the London School of Theology’s Open Learning module on Hermeneutics, I came across a good quotation from Richard Bauckham regarding the potential that time-honoured interpretive traditions have for creating an illusion of permanence and absoluteness: The sheer length and continuity… ()
Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity: the question about other religions
In Brian McLaren’s better future Christianity is a force not for distrust, hatred and conflict between the world’s religions but for peace, tolerance and understanding. For most of Christian history the underlying Greco-Roman imperial mindset has generated 1) anxiety, 2) paranoia, 3) a… ( | 1 comment)
Penal substitutionary atonement and narrative theology
I can recommend an astute essay on the current state of the atonement debate by Jason Hood, who is scholar in residence at Christ UMC in Memphis. He makes two general points. The first – a matter of systematic theology – is that despite the sustained scholarly and sub-scholarly onslaught… ( | 10 comments)
Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity: A better way of viewing the future?
It comes as no surprise that when McLaren comes to address the question of how a new kind of Christianity might view the future, he starts by describing a nightmarish populist account of the end-times deeply influenced by the Greco-Roman narrative. The dangers of a dispensationalist eschatology are… ()