David has provided a very nice commentary on my previous post about the resurrection of Jesus on the third day. He has made it clear that he gets the main contention about the historical framing: “Too often we read the New Testament as if it dropped out of the sky rather than emerging from a real story, rooted in Israel and moving outward into the world.” But he pushes back at a number of points. He insists that the resurrection of Jesus in the New Testament is treated not merely as a moment in Jewish history but as an event of universal human significance. I have highlighted his main concerns and responded.
In a comment on an old post looking at a review by Larry Hurtado of Dunn’s Did the First Christians Worship Jesus, Marc Taylor maintains that “Dunn’s assertion that certain prayer words are not used in reference to the Lord Jesus is without merit.” He lists four passages in Acts and a… ( | 15 comments)
The New Testament is a thoroughly apocalyptic set of documents. I made the point to my friend JR Rozko last night as we walked through Soho that our current narrative theologies place a great deal of emphasis on the story of Israel that culminates in Jesus, but the New Testament has much more to… ( | 48 comments)
Bruce Chilton starts his book Pure Kingdom: Jesus’ Vision of God by noting that at the end of the nineteenth century Albert Schweitzer had come to the realisation that the “kingdom of God” was basically “eschatological”. He had seen the connection between Jesus’ teaching and the… ( | 4 comments)
What does Jesus mean when he teaches his disciples to pray “lead us not into temptation”? In a brief appendix (“Jesus’ Prayer and the War of Worlds”) to his book Pure Kingdom: Jesus’ Vision of God Bruce Chilton aims to define a middle ground between two misunderstandings of the… ( | 1 comment)
The National Secular Society has taken Tom Wright to task for advocating a “cruciform theocracy” that would overcome the prevailing separation of religion and politics in the West. A more detailed summary of Wright’s talk at St Paul’s Cathedral in London a week ago can be found on the… ( | 17 comments)
As an addendum to the previous post contrasting two accounts of resurrection here’s a set of diagrams illustrating three ways of thinking about the relationship between the resurrection of Jesus and subsequent resurrections. The first is the conventional modern evangelical view that can’t see… ( | 1 comment)
I have to say, I have enjoyed my conversation with Carl Mosser about theosis as an account of what it ultimately means to be redeemed. I still don’t really get it. That may have something to do with language—an “allergic reaction” on my part to the “deification terminology”—but… ( | 12 comments)
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