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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Judging the twelve tribes of Israel
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NT Wright and the confusion of kingdom and new creation
I came across a curious paragraph in Tom Wright’s Simply Christian, in which he highlights a ‘mystery’ in the social organization of God’s ‘new world’. He argues that the end of all things is not the emigration of the righteous to heaven but the reintegration of heaven and… ( | 1 comment)
Eschatology, Anabaptism, and the end of Christendom
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Moving eschatological mountains?
These rudimentary comments were prompted by a conversation with Andrew Jones in Amsterdam about the eschatological significance of Jesus’ saying about moving mountains as it is found in connection with the cursing of the fig tree in Jerusalem (Mk. 11:23; Matt. 21:21) and the failure of the… ()
Review of Brian McLaren's Everything Must Change (part 2)
Everything Must Change (see the synopsis in the first part of this review) will be read by many as a challenge to the modern church to exchange an ineffectual and theologically suspect notion of what it means to be Christian for an ‘emerging’ understanding that offers a credible hope of… ()
Review of Brian McLaren's Everything Must Change (part 1)
It’s three months now since Brian McLaren’s latest book Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope was released, and in the frenzied, web-driven world of emerging theology, three months is a long time. For all I know it’s not even his latest book any more… ()
Re: Mission: Biblical Mission for a Post-Biblical Church
I am pleased to say that my book has just been published by Paternoster in their ‘Faith in an Emerging Culture’ series. The book builds on the argument of The Coming of the Son of Man but broadens the scope of its historical-realist narrative to embrace an understanding of ‘mission’ that… ()