In a fourth piece on the kingdom of God, Joel Green argues that the kingdom of God is a “master lens through which the nature of reality is disclosed and by which all rival accounts of reality are measured.” It is not a doctrine, it is a way of seeing. That sounds like a very modern notion. Is it likely to help us understand the biblical concept better? I don’t think so. Hermeneutically speaking, I think it’s moving us in the wrong direction.

1. The kingdom of God, Green says, is not a topic within theology but a “theological hermeneutic,” a way of seeing and interpreting the world. It tells us “who the principal actor in history is, what kind of ruler he is, what he is doing in the world, and therefore how human beings are to locate themselves within that world.”

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I started looking at Hebrews 10 in order to reply to a comment from Chris Wooldridge, who cited the chapter as an example of how Jesus’ death is treated not only as a historical event but also as a theological or metaphysical event.But you quickly discover that Hebrews 10 is part of a long… ( | 4 comments)
In his excellent essay on mystical transformation in Philo and Paul, Volker Rabens says of 2 Corinthians 3:18: “Many who have tried to grasp the nuances of Paul’s argument in this passage have at times felt that they themselves have a veil over their minds” (297-98). A.T. Hanson called it “the… ( | 10 comments)
What does Paul mean when he says: “we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image, from glory to glory” (2 Cor. 3:18)? Over the last couple of posts I have been tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of exegesis. ( | 10 comments)
In the previous piece on being transformed into the image of Christ, I included 2 Corinthians 3:18 in a wider pattern in Paul whereby conformity to the image of Christ means specifically sharing in his suffering and resurrection:And we all, with unveiled face, beholding (or reflecting) the glory of… ( | 12 comments)
I’ve just got back from a missions conference at which the idea that believers in general and “missionaries” in particular are being—or should be—transformed into the “image of Christ” got a lot of airtime.I can see what people are getting at. The assumption is that Jesus represents either an ideal… ( | 3 comments)
The title of the previous piece (“The death of Jesus: not as difficult to understand as you might think”) was perhaps a mistake. I suspect that many people found my narrative-historical reinterpretation as baffling as the classical theories of the atonement, if not more so.In my defence I would say… ( | 10 comments)
Peter Enns has written in his characteristically provocative style about two issues in the Bible that are really important but not at all clear.The first has to do with Israelite origins. We can be reasonably confident about the broad outline of Israelite history back to the reign of David, but… ( | 46 comments)