This is a rather technical examination of Jason Staples’ argument in Paul and the Resurrection of Israel: Jews, Former Gentiles, Israelites that when Paul speaks of Israel as “vessels of wrath,” he does not mean that the people are are the objects of God’s wrath; rather they are the instruments of God’s redemptive purposes. My view has been that Paul is saying that part of Israel really has become liable to destruction—much as Jesus foresaw destruction coming upon Jerusalem and the temple. But perhaps I’ve got it wrong.
Jesus’ parable of the wedding feast in Matthew 22:1-14, like the two parables preceding it, is directed against the chief priests and elders of the people who questioned his authority to pronounce judgment on the temple (Matt. 21:23-27). The leaders of Israel are those who refuse to attend the… ()
The Hebrew word shalom features prominently in “missional church” discourse. John Franke says, for example, in his Missional Theology: An Introduction: “The restoration of peace or shalom, the all-embracing blessing of the God of Israel and Jesus Christ, may be the simplest, most… ()
This is a story of our times, surely: a person I know slightly, trapped a while back in an evangelical Reformed seminary, drawn to the narrative-historical argument but not sure what to do with it, has now abandoned his faith, identifying as someone who is at best sympathetic to the … ( | 3 comments)
I have Daniel Hoffman to thank for this little aperçu.
Jesus is riding on a young horse (pōlon), perhaps awkwardly on a young donkey, descending the Mount of Olives towards Jerusalem (Lk. 19:37). There is no explicit reference to Zechariah 9:9, but presumably the allusion was not lost on… ()
The books I’ve been reading on “missional church” have a couple of key objectives in common: to describe the progress of the Western church towards a new “missional” paradigm, and to map that paradigm on to an expansive reading of the biblical narrative. It’s an obvious, perhaps inevitable,… ( | 6 comments)
A significant tranche of missional church thinking centres on the APEST paradigm. The argument is that if the church is to become a movement again after the sclerotic institutionalism of the Christendom era, it needs urgently to reactivate the gifts of apostle, prophet, and evangelist. Shepherds… ( | 2 comments)
It is clear from reading recent books on missional church that a missional theology needs to extend in two directions. It needs to extend in a social direction to encompass the existence of churches as communities interacting with societies; and it needs to give an account of the… ()
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