Recent posts

The incomplete world-tilting gospel of Dan Phillips, part 2
I suggested in part 1 of this review that conventional evangelical or Reformed constructions of the gospel, such as Dan Phillips’ The World-Tilting Gospel, take no account of the Old Testament story of the people of God from Abraham to Antiochus Epiphanes. It is not enough to… ( | 3 comments)
The incomplete world-tilting gospel of Dan Phillips, part 1
Dan Phillips’ book The World-Tilting Gospel is not a book I would normally read, let alone review. But I like the Pyromaniacs, the book can for now be downloaded free for the Kindle, and it offers another opportunity to try to explain why I think the traditional modern evangelical or… ( | 2 comments)
The angels in Tartarus
A couple of comments relating to the reference to “Tartarus” in 2 Peter 2:4…1. The allusion here is to the fallen angels or Watchers of Hellenistic-Jewish apocalyptic tradition (cf. Jude 6; 1 Enoch 6-16). The thought is only that they are kept securely in Tartarus, the place of the dead… ( | 0 comments)
How does annihilation act as a warning…?
Responding to some of the recent posts on hell Steven Opp emailed me with a few questions. The first has to do with the motivational value of a doctrine of annihilation. If the Gehenna passages in the New Testament actually refer to temporal judgment on Israel as part of a narrative of… ( | 6 comments)
The medium of En-dor and the question of life after death
I argued recently that the New Testament conceives of any life after death in terms of the resurrection of the body and does not entertain the notion that some immaterial part of a person—the “soul”—survives the destruction of the body to be either rewarded in heaven or punished in hell. See “Why… ( | 8 comments)
Historical context for the New Testament
I keep making the point that the New Testament is a situated theological engagement with the historical narrative of the people of God. As such it is a work both of memory and of imagination: it addresses the present in the light of what has happened and what will happen. It seems a good… ( | 2 comments)
Response to Ben Witherington on Gehenna
Ben Witherington has taken the trouble to post a couple of comments (here and here) in response to my critique of his argument about Gehenna in his book Revelation and the End Times. He makes four points in defence of his more or less traditional understanding of geenna in the… ( | 3 comments)
Gospel: a story in parts
The “good news” in the New Testament is really the telling of the whole story, from Jesus’ initial proclamation to Israel through to judgment on the pagan world. But it has been broken down into its component parts. This observation correlates rather well with Scot McKnight’s argument that… ( | 4 comments)
Scot McKnight and the gospel of King Jesus: halfway there
In his new book The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited Scot McKnight starts out by arguing that the “gospel” has to be distinguished from the “plan of salvation” that lies at the heart of modern evangelical theology and preaching. The gospel is not a formula for personal… ( | 12 comments)
Ben Witherington III on Gehenna, and the clash of paradigms
The premise of this site is that evangelical theology is in transition and that this transition is driven by some really quite deep tectonic shifts in the way that the evangelical community understands its biblical origins. In simple terms, it amounts to a clash between two paradigms—one that… ( | 7 comments)
Emerging ecclesiology in crisis
I have been meaning for some time to respond to some comments made by Jason Clark to the effect that the emerging church lacks a coherent ecclesiology. He was commenting on a piece I wrote four years ago asking: What does the emerging church stand for? Jason acknowledges that there have been some… ( | 5 comments)
How could the church have got doctrine x wrong?
Doctrinal revisionism is in the air, and unsurprisingly it makes people nervous. Currently it appears that many of the fundamental tenets of modern Protestant orthodoxy are being subjected to critical re-examination from the inside—among them justification by faith, penal substitutionary atonement… ( | 28 comments)
1 Peter and communities of eschatological transformation
This is another attempt to sketch the “eschatological” narrative that underlies 1 Peter and shapes the theological content of the Letter. My argument is that the eschatology—the narratively constructed future that can be extrapolated from the Letter—is not merely a component of Peter… ( | 11 comments)
Jimmy Dunn: one God, one Lord, and the Shema
During a lively dialogue with Larry Hurtado at the British New Testament Society conference this morning Jimmy Dunn put forward his well known view that there is a significant functional differentiation—even subordination—between Jesus and God in the New Testament that should not be obscured in our… ( | 7 comments)
The revelation of Jesus: a quick narrative-historical reading of 1 Peter
Behind every letter in the New Testament there is a story. Behind Romans, for example, there is the story of communities of Gentile Christians called in Christ to be living sacrifices for the sake of the eventual victory of Israel’s God over the gods and powers of the pagan world. That’… ( | 9 comments)
Why do we need a divine author?
In his address to the Jews in the synagogue in Antioch of Pisidia Paul draws on three distinct passages from the Old Testament in order to say something about the resurrection of Jesus: “You are my Son, today I have begotten you” (Acts 13:33; cf. Ps. 2:7); “I will give you the holy and sure… ( | 2 comments)
Resurrection from the dead
The basic template for New Testament belief in any sort of life after death is the Jewish idea of the resurrection of a person from the dead at the end of the age—and probably the resurrection of the righteous Jew who has lost his or her life out of loyalty to YHWH (cf. Dan. 12:2-3). Personal… ( | 5 comments)
God not of the dead but of the living
Here is the question: When Jesus says, “He is not God of the dead, but of the living,” does he mean that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are alive somewhere, awaiting resurrection? Those who maintain that the New Testament teaches at least a conscious intermediate state in the presence of Jesus will… ( | 7 comments)
Why you won't go to heaven when you die
The traditional view is that when Christians die, they go to heaven. This notion is almost as erroneous as the view that the unsaved will be subjected to an eternity of unalloyed suffering in “hell”. Both beliefs are distortions of the biblical perspective and—I modestly propose—should be… ( | 27 comments)
History and theology: never the twain shall meet
Murray Rae’s History and Hermeneutics is “an enquiry into how theology and history may be thought together”. This is an overriding concern of contemporary hermeneutics, and the book is an excellent contribution to the debate. But how you think the problem is to be resolved depends… ( | 1 comment)