Recent posts

Son of Man, Jesus’ use thereof
The "Son of Man" motif is central to Jesus' self-understanding and of critical importance for a narrative-historical reading of the New Testament. As J.D.G. Dunn says:After 'the kingdom of God/heaven' there is no phrase so common in the Jesus tradition as 'the son of man'. Its importance within the… ( | 8 comments)
The New Testament and “what now for the church”
One of the objections most forcefully raised against a consistent narrative-historical reading of the New Testament is that it makes the texts more or less irrelevant as a source of teaching and inspiration for the church today. Peter Wilkinson expressed this objection in a recent comment in no… ( | 7 comments)
Jesus and the authority to forgive sins
This is one of the passages that is often put forward as “evidence” that the synoptic Gospel account already presents Jesus as both human and divine. The argument is that i) it is the prerogative of God to forgive sins, ii) in this story Jesus forgives sins, iii) therefore Jesus must be God. Added… ( | 5 comments)
Theology and history and Jesus as the culmination of Israel's story
For reasons which I won’t disclose, I have been working through a doctrine course of a distinctly Reformed hue. If the church is convinced that it needs such a thing as a “doctrine course”, Reformed or otherwise, then this is by no means a bad one. But for me it has highlighted again the fact… ( | 14 comments)
The history of biblical interpretation—a tale of two cities
The history of biblical interpretation is a tale of two cities—not London and Paris (Dickens), or even Jerusalem and Athens (Tertullian), but Alexandria and Antioch. In the third and fourth centuries Alexandria stood for an allegorizing approach to interpretation that sought to maximize the… ( | 10 comments)
A hymn of praise to the anti-Caesar
This is a much debated passage, a good part of the discussion having to do with the question of whether it reflects a “high christology”. Is Jesus presented here as a preexisting divine figure who becomes incarnate as man, who dies (for the sins of the world), and who then is re-identified with the… ( | 19 comments)
Modern evangelicalism is the new Gnosticism... well, sort of
I have long harboured the suspicion that in certain respects, in certain habits of thought, modern evangelicalism has more in common with second century Gnosticism than with first century Christianity. I accept that the analogy is impressionistic and cannot be pushed very far, but I still think… ( | 15 comments)
Election, A radical New Perspective on
Calvinism is right to highlight the biblical rhetoric of election, foreknowledge and predetermination. It is wrong, however, in its understanding of the narrative in which that rhetoric is deployed; it is wrong about the purpose of election.Reformed orthodoxy claims that election is an… ( | 11 comments)
Chosen before the foundation of the world
Paul says that the God who has given the Spirit to his people, chose (exelexato) us in him before the construction of the world (1:4), pre-appointed (proorisas, prooristhentes) us for adoption and to be “for the praise of his glory” (1:5, 11-12).Paul’s language of… ( | 0 comments)
Election and the martyr church
Context is everything. Take Paul’s highly rhetorical statement out of context, separate it from friends and family, subject it to solitary confinement throughout long periods of cultural change, beat it about the head a bit, interrogate it mercilessly from behind the blinding light of a… ( | 7 comments)
The election of Gentiles
The story of what happened in Pisidian Antioch is well known (Acts 13:13-52). Paul and Barnabas are invited to speak in the synagogue. Paul relates how God chose their fathers, brought them out of Egypt, suffered their folly in the wilderness for forty years, destroyed the “seven nations… ( | 8 comments)
Redefining evangelicalism
Scot McKnight has started working through David Fitch’s massively titled book The End of Evangelicalism? Discerning a New Faithfulness for Mission: Towards an Evangelical Political Theology (Theopolitical Visions). I strongly recommend following him if you’re interested… ( | 4 comments)
Paul's argument about election in Romans 9
I have been trying for a few weeks to write a response to some difficult questions, put to me by a friend, about the Canaanite genocide, hell, election, and the “ludicrous contortions that a Calvinist needed to make in order to explain how God was fair to judge the non elect”. I have come to… ( | 10 comments)
Did Jesus preach to the spirits in prison between his death and resurrection?
Here’s another approach to Easter at an exegetical tangent. This question came up as part of a discussion about the supposed “intermediate state” between death and resurrection. My view is that Jesus died, was dead, and was raised from dead, setting a pattern for all subsequent deaths and… ( | 13 comments)
The resurrection of the sleeping saints from their tombs
What does the peculiar and commonly overlooked incident of the resurrection of the saints at the time of Jesus’ death (Matt. 27:51-53) tell us about the meaning of Easter? From a historical-critical perspective the little story is highly problematic and has had even some more conservative… ( | 16 comments)
Heaven
By comparison with “hell”, which in its traditional sense is not a biblical idea, “heaven” ought to be a fairly straightforward theological concept to explain. Surely heaven is simply what belief in Jesus is ultimately all about? It’s where we go when we die. It’s what makes sitting… ( | 6 comments)
The unbiblical doctrine of “hell”
I set out a while back to write a general piece on the unbiblical doctrine of “hell” as part of a glossary or lexicon of key concepts but got side-tracked. Since then the brouhaha over Rob Bell’s book has prompted extensive reflection on the matter, and it now seems worth providing a rough… ( | 61 comments)
Roger Olson and the definition of postconservative evangelicalism
Roger Olson quotes what seems to me to be a not fully comprehensive definition of the category “postconservative evangelical” from a book by Steven B. Sherman called Revitalizing Theological Epistemology: Holistic Approaches to the Knowledge of God: Basically, they [postconservative… ( | 5 comments)
A New Translation: The Earliest Christian Documents: AD 49-100
Three converging thoughts…. First, the lead codices are presumably fake, but they raise an interesting hypothetical question, nevertheless: How different would our understanding of the earliest Christian texts be if we were now to stumble across them for the first time, with a hermeneutical… ( | 21 comments)
What must I do to inherit eternal life?
Scot McKnight has been running a good series of posts working through Rob Bell’s Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. In the fourth post he considers what Bell has to say about the question put to Jesus by the rich young man (Matt. 19:16… ( | 25 comments)