The Spirit of prophecy and renewal

Westbourne Grove Church, which I help to lead, is part of the Forge Sphere of churches in the south of England, which used to be part of Salt & Light, which is a network of “neocharismatic Evangelical” churches associated with the British New Church Movement.

So no surprise that the Forge summer camp at beautiful Ashburnham Place in East Sussex had some serious charismatic energy to it, boosted by rumours of a “quiet revival.”

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Stone Chapel podcast with David Capes
I did a couple of podcast episodes recently with David Capes for The Stone Chapel Podcasts, talking about my book In the Form of a God: The Pre-existence of the Exalted Christ in Paul. ()
My reading of the Philippians encomium visualised
It is easy to visualise the traditional interpretation of Philippians 2:6-11 as a downward parabola or u-bend: Christ existed in heaven from eternity “in the form of God”; he descended into the world, becoming man and dying on the cross; then he is raised from the dead and restored to his position… ( | 13 comments)
In the form of a god: the anarthrous genitive construction
This is a dull, and frankly unnecessary, technical note on the genitive construction with a preposition en morphēi theou (ἐν μορφῇ θεοῦ) in Philippians 2:6. I’ve had to look at this a bit more closely following a rather disjointed conversation with someone on Twitter who had different… ( | 12 comments)
In the form of a god: what does the lack of an article tell us?
John Baumberger has a question about my translation of en morphē theou in Philippians 2:6 as “in the form of a god.” He takes issue with the indefinite construction on a couple of grounds:1. The word theos ‘without the definite article almost always refers to God himself (and not… ( | 10 comments)
The downs and ups of Philippians 2:6-11
The famous passage about Christ in Philippians 2:6-11 is usually described as a “hymn,” and is usually taken to celebrate the inverted parabola of Christ’s descent from heaven, his incarnation as man, the nadir of his death on the cross, followed by his return to heaven and exaltation to a position… ( | 15 comments)
Beyond Easter, and how we might put an Adam typology to good use
Just for the sake of completeness, here is one final visual representation of the two-part significance of Easter. It’s now getting a bit overloaded, I know—two storylines, four landing points, and an unexpected back-reference to the flood; but I don’t want to give the impression that history has… ()
The inversion of the Easter week stories diagrammatised
This is a brief addendum to the earlier post this week about the two meanings of Easter. A bit of an exchange on Facebook suggested to me that modern theologies of Easter are a striking inversion of what we find in the New Testament. I have tried to represent this graphically. ()