Recent posts

Rob Bell, Justin Taylor, love fails, and the meaning of salvation
Jim Hoag has highlighted an intemperate reaction by Justin Taylor on the Gospel Coalition blog to a yet unpublished book by Rob Bell entitled Love Wins: Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, and a response by Kurt Willems arguing that Taylor’s critique is… ( | 10 comments)
Where is the gospel that will drive the missional movement?
Alan Hirsch argues in Right Here, Right Now (written with Lance Ford) that the future of Christianity in the West depends on the church becoming a people movement again: “Somehow and in some way, we need to loosen up and learn how to reactivate the massive potentials that lie rather… ( | 4 comments)
The lost and the unlost in the parable of the prodigal son
What is the parable of the prodigal son about? It was cited in a recent comment here as evidence that the gospel is all about sinners repenting and being reconciled to the Father—and that is certainly how it would typically be understood by evangelicals. There may be some disagreement over… ( | 19 comments)
The re-evangelization of the nations
At Holy Trinity Brompton this morning we prayed for—among other things and somewhat in passing—the “re-evangelization of the nations”. That’s a weighty and portentous phrase. What are we supposed to mean by it? Holy Trinity Brompton is a church with an expansive vision, but I imagine that… ( | 5 comments)
Scot McKnight and Jesus’ ethic of the kingdom
I really like Scot McKnight’s book A New Vision for Israel. There are a couple of areas of “structural” disagreement, if you like. I touched on the question of the finality of Jesus’ understanding of the coming kingdom of God in a previous post, to which Scot helpfully… ( | 0 comments)
Joel and the day of Pentecost
The scope of Joel’s prophecy and its relation to Peter’s sermon on the day of Pentecost has come up in discussion relating to the judgment of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25:31-46. It seems to me that the traditional understanding of Pentecost simply as a formative event for the… ( | 6 comments)
Scot McKnight and Jesus' vision for Israel
I am reading Scot McKnight’s book A New Vision for Israel: The Teachings of Jesus in National Context, and I’m very impressed so far with his decisive and really quite radical argument about Jesus and the kingdom. The book was published in 1999, and, frankly, I wonder whether… ( | 9 comments)
The judgment of the sheep and the goats
I have been teaching this week on eschatology (and empire), and a question put to me about the setting of the judgment of the nations described in Matthew 25:31-46 has made me look again at the passage. The scene is set with a dramatic account of the Son of Man coming in his glory, with all his… ( | 17 comments)
Westerholm and the New Perspective: both right, both wrong
It just so happened that having finished the post on Justification with reference to Wright, Gorman and Campbell, I had an email from a friend at Regent College asking what I thought of Stephen Westerholm’s critique of the New Perspective in a CTQ article from 2006 entitled “… ( | 4 comments)
Justification with reference to Wright, Gorman and Campbell
We approach the problem of the meaning of “justification” in the New Testament much as many hopeful rescuers approached Sleeping Beauty’s castle. We know the story of how the fair Princess Dikaiōsis, deceived by a wicked fairy, pricked her finger on the spindle of a Reformation… ( | 14 comments)
The punishment of eternal destruction
The 9Marks site had an eJournal devoted to the “Awful Reality” of hell last year. Reading through the various articles in defence of the traditional interpretation goaded me into starting a general account of New Testament teaching on this thing which we wrongly label “hell” as part of my vaguely… ( | 28 comments)
Peter Leithart: Constantine and the end of sacrifice
In the final chapter of Defending Constantine Peter Leithart does two things. He rejects Yoder’s argument about the Constantinian “fall” of the church as being both historically and methodologically flawed; and he puts forward an alternative account of the “major (if not exactly… ( | 1 comment)
Peter Leithart: Christian Empire, Christian Mission
In a chapter on “Christian Empire, Christian Mission” in Defending Constantine Peter Leithart challenges the view of John Howard Yoder—widely accepted amongst modern theologians if not amongst historians—that Constantinianism was a fundamental departure from the intention of Jesus and the… ( | 1 comment)
Salvation
Salvation in the GospelsIn the context of the Gospels “salvation” is the salvation of at least part of Israel from the foreseen destruction of Jerusalem and the temple and from the accompanying devastation of the nation. It is in the first place, therefore, a national or political category… ( | 4 comments)
Defending Constantine: the failure of imagination
I am increasingly coming to the view that a narrative-historical reading of the New Testament will sooner or later be seen to have significant implications for how we understand the transition that the church made in the fourth century from persecuted minority to privileged imperial religion. For… ( | 8 comments)
The message of the Bible in one sentence
Dane Ortlund, Senior Editor at Crossway Books (Bible division) recently asked 25 scholars and pastors to sum up the “message of the Bible in one sentence”. You can read the contributions, some of which are really quite good exemplars of the genre, on his Strawberry-Rhubarb Theology… ( | 48 comments)
The inheritance of the world: Paul and the happy-ever-after
The lengthy responses provoked by the third post on missio Dei make for very good reading. I am neither a historian nor a missiologist. What interests me primarily in this discussion is the question of where the New Testament’s view of the future lands us. The traditional view—… ( | 1 comment)
“Missio Dei” in historical perspectives, part 3
I started out with a brief history of the missio Dei concept from its origins in Karl Barth’s argument that mission is essentially an attribute of the Triune God, not an activity of the church, to the appropriation of the term by the missional church movement. I then suggested that… ( | 14 comments)
Jesus, Paul, and emergents’ anxieties about the wrath of God
Mike Morrell asks a couple of very pertinent questions in response to my “presumptuous appeal to both emergents and Reformed”. Very pertinent. The first has to do with the relationship between Jesus and Paul, the second with the fact that any talk about the “wrath” of God makes emergent type… ( | 1 comment)
“Missio Dei” in historical perspectives, part 2
In The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative Chris Wright follows David Bosch’s analysis and comes to the same basic conclusion—that the phrase missio Dei remains valuable because it expresses a major biblical truth: “The God revealed in the Scriptures… ( | 7 comments)