Recent posts

The prophetic relationship of the people of God to the “land”
One of the questions that came out of the recent discussion of the Beatitudes has to do with the place of the land in the eschatological restoration of the people of God. I suggested that Jesus’ promise to the “meek” was that they would inherit not the “earth” but the “land”—gē can mean “… ( | 6 comments)
Scripture as the (historical) theological interpretation of history
This is a fundamental dilemma facing biblical hermeneutics: how do we get from scripture as ancient religious text, which is at one level at least unquestionably what it is, to scripture as Word of God for the church today, which at one level at least is unquestionably what it… ( | 4 comments)
Review of The Coming of the Son of Man
Daniel Levy has written a very good, thorough, and largely sympathetic (quizzical in places rather than critical) review of The Coming of the Son of Man. He took the trouble to raise some questions with me in advance regarding the “rapture”, to which I responded in “Resurrection,… ( | 0 comments)
Pistis Christou and Paul’s controlling narratives
Some prominent scholars (so far Thomas Schreiner and Craig Blomberg) have been posting their views regarding the much debated translation of pistis Christou in Galatians 2:16 on the new BibleGateway translation forum. I think the debate is important, but not as important as the underlying… ( | 0 comments)
New Perspective and Reformed theologies at a crossroads
Jim Hoag has a couple of pertinent questions about my “Postconservative evangelicalism and beyond” post—pertinent, in fact, to the point that he makes me wonder whether the piece had much in the way of substance to it at all. The first question has to do with what we understand by the “New… ( | 4 comments)
Douglas Campbell and the wrath of God
A few pages from the end of The Deliverance of God Douglas Campbell appends a rather limp section—less than a page—on the “wrath of God” (929-30). The discussion, admittedly, concludes a chapter examining only Philippians and a smattering of “ancillary’ texts in the light of his re-reading… ( | 3 comments)
Becoming like Jesus—not all that it’s made out to be
I wrote a couple of weeks back about the close and defining connection in Paul’s thought between sonship and the specific theme of suffering and vindication. Paul appears to make a crucial distinction in Romans 8:16-17 between being ‘heirs of God’ (klēronomoi… theou) and being… ( | 0 comments)
Postconservative evangelicalism and beyond
I thought I had found a nice new label for myself: a ‘postconservative evangelical’. Roger Olson defines the term in Reformed and Always Reforming: The Postconservative Approach to Evangelical Theology and makes reference to it in a post on NT Wright and the New Perspective. Wright… ( | 2 comments)
Daniel Kirk on Mark 13
Daniel Kirk has been running an excellent series of posts on Mark 13—excellent in the sense that I agree with pretty much everything he says. For convenience I have listed his posts here, starting with the most recent: Narrative & Theological Ramifications of Mark 13 as AD 70 Objections to… ( | 1 comment)
Salvation comes a close second
In a chapter in The Deliverance of God exploring the ‘yawning gap between Justification theory’s description of Judaism and the actual nature of of surrounding Judaism’ (124) Douglas Campbell makes the point that by no means all forms of Judaism were preoccupied with matters of… ( | 4 comments)
Resurrection, rapture and relevance
Daniel Levy has posed a couple of questions regarding the thesis of The Coming of the Son of Man. Part of my argument in the book is that much of the language of resurrection refers not to a final and general resurrection of the dead but specifically to the resurrection of the martyrs who… ( | 11 comments)
Prophecy and predetermination
Phil Johnson posted a very brief statement about divine foreknowledge on the Pyromaniacs blog today to the effect that Arminians must ‘deny God’s foreknowledge, thereby nullifying God’s omniscience’. The assumption is basically that if God is omniscient, he must also know the future,… ( | 5 comments)
Douglas Campbell’s insufficiently apocalyptic reading of justification in Paul
Having worked through the first part of Douglas Campbell’s The Deliverance of God I think at least one broad provisional judgment can be made with regard to his general approach. What Campbell has done so far is set out in a very thorough and rigorous fashion what he understands by… ( | 0 comments)
When we say church
I saw a link to this short, simple and sweet video from The Well in Brussels on Rob Fairbanks' blog. I know all those beautiful people. Wes and I were there a few weeks back talking about shalom. They are a wonderfully honest and adventurous and compassionate community. When We Say… ( | 0 comments)
Scot McKnight on Peter Leithart’s defence of Constantine
Scot McKnight has been looking at Peter Leithart’s book Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom. Scot doesn’t sound too impressed at the outset by Leithart’s thesis, and much of the comment has been from scandalized Anabaptists. Scot… ( | 13 comments)
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
In a post on the ‘community of the Beatitudes and the restoration of creation’ I suggested that while the Beatitudes are not universal ‘Christian’ truths but contingent teaching aimed at the formation in Israel of a community of transitional renewal, it may nevertheless make sense to ‘transpose’… ( | 5 comments)
The case against (and for) coercive violence in Paul
Douglas Campbell has a curious and ambivalent excursus (89-94) appended to the section in The Deliverance of God in which he claims that Justification theory and the ‘alternative theory’ of salvation drawn from Romans 5-8 differ markedly in the place that they accord ‘coercive and violent… ( | 0 comments)
Campbell’s The deliverance of God: three problems, one culprit, two books
I got my hands on Douglas Campbell’s The Deliverance of God only at a late stage of writing The Future of the People of God and could not make more than limited and very selective use of it. That may have been just as well—in any case, I have now picked it up again with the… ( | 2 comments)
The community of the Beatitudes and the restoration of creation
Brian MacArevey picked up on a comment I made about the relationship between suffering and prosperity in my post on sonship and suffering in Romans and wondered out loud what I would make of a piece he had written about ‘eschatological blessing’ – and you really have to ask yourself, How did… ( | 22 comments)
Sonship and suffering at the heart of Romans
Mike was preaching about sonship yesterday and the need for Christians to discover or claim for themselves the full blessings of having been adopted as sons. I have more sympathy for prosperity theology than is probably good for me, and I take quite seriously the argument that we are often a long… ( | 0 comments)