Why (and where) you should get some theological (by which I really mean biblical) education

The term “polycrisis” gets used a lot these days to name a peculiar consequence of globalisation: the collision of expanding systems in shock—energy, climate, geo-politics, finance, etc., with AI accelerating the chaos—in a confined planetary space.

The world has reached some sort of tipping point, which may or may not prove to be catastrophic but which arguably signals the irreversible transition from an age during which humanity has flourished within the natural order to an age of human domination over the natural order. This new age is often called the Anthropocene, though ironically the dominance of the anthropos is already being threatened by an AI insurgency. Serves us right!

The church also has to navigate this difficult transition—these birth pains of a new and very uncertain age.

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I take several chapters in my book In the Form of a God: The Pre-existence of the Exalted Christ in Paul to argue that in the first part of the Christ encomium in Philippians 2:6-11 the direction of travel is ontologically flat: not from heaven to earth but from celebrity to… ( | 3 comments)
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Christians who think that it is right and good to maintain a form a patriarchy, at least in church and home, will often argue that by naming the woman Adam exercises or asserts an innate, creational authority over her that is not abrogated by salvation. In search of a suitable helper for… ( | 2 comments)
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I have been working through Craig Keener’s Spirit Hermeneutics: Reading Scripture in Light of Pentecost (2016) to prepare some teaching materials on Pentecostal hermeneutics. It’s a fairly casual read, so far at least. I could really do with something a bit more technical. But it’s a good… ()
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“My Lord and my God!” Is this theology or rhetoric?
This is a brief re-examination of Thomas’ famous declaration “My Lord and my God” in John 20:28. I looked at this some years ago, noting the common argument that the wording of the confession reflects the “custom,” recorded in Suetonius and Dio Cassius, of addressing the emperor Domitian (AD 81-96… ( | 17 comments)