Recent posts

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)
How does God speak to us through an ancient text?
This quotation from a book by J. Todd Billings called The Word of God for the People of God: an entryway to the theological interpretation of scripture rather effectively gets to the heart of the dilemma created by readings of the New Testament that insist on the historical… ( | 0 comments)
There must be some misunderstanding
Peter has reached the point of sheer exasperation in our discussion of the meaning of Jesus’ parable of the wise and foolish virgins, so it is time to stop, apologize, and perhaps try to understand why it can be so difficult to reach agreement over matters of biblical interpretation. Part of the… ( | 5 comments)
The story they found themselves in
The main challenge of New Testament theology at the moment, as the church struggles more or less self-consciously to come to terms with its modern exile, is to tell and retell the story of which Jesus is part – to tell it both critically and hopefully, in a way that brings out its complexity… ( | 0 comments)
The wise and foolish virgins
What is the historical frame of reference of Jesus’ parable of the five wise and five foolish virgins? Tradition has taught us to read this as a story about a final consummation at the second coming of Jesus, at some uncertain point in our own future. Taken in isolation from the story that… ( | 5 comments)
Roger E. Olson: Opposing Calvinism
For much of the last decade the tide of popular-level evangelical theology – by which I mean theology as it engages constructively with the life and mission of the church – has been moving strongly in an emerging direction. At least, that has been my perception. Over the last couple of years,… ( | 2 comments)
Why I don't like systematic theologies: the problem of hell
This is why I don’t like systematic theologies. I picked up a copy of John M. Frame’s Salvation Belongs to the Lord: An introduction to systematic theology today – it’s amazing what you can find in Dubai, as long as it’s Reformed. The book is a classic example of… ( | 5 comments)
The symbolism of the Son of man coming on the clouds and the meaning of kingdom
In the discussion prompted by my post on ‘The parables of delay and the question of dual fulfilment’ paulf argued that it’s impossible to resolve the tension in Jesus’ apocalyptic discourse between the early references to the destruction of Jerusalem and the later statement about the Son of… ( | 11 comments)
The Biologos statement of faith
The Biologos Foundation, which ‘addresses the central themes of science and religion and emphasizes the compatibility of Christian faith with scientific discoveries about the origins of the universe and life’, has come up with a statement of faith, shamelessly cribbed from 1 Corinthians 15:1-5: … ( | 0 comments)
Is evangelicalism worth fighting for?
There has been a lot of debate recently about the contested identity of the evangelical movement in America. We have been aware for some time of the strength of the neo-Reformed reaction against the emerging movement. I wrote a piece a while back about the depressing war between Emergents and… ( | 2 comments)
The parables of delay and the question of dual fulfilment
In response to my comments on the fulfilment of prophecy it was suggested to me (by other channels) that while much of Matthew 24 can ‘with difficulty’ be made to fit exclusively into an AD 70 framework, the same cannot be said for the parables of delay in 24:36 - 25:30. In other words, Jesus must… ( | 9 comments)
How many times is a prophecy fulfilled?
I have just come across an old and decidedly skimpy review by Kyle McDanell of The Coming of the Son of Man. Judging by the list of his favourite blogs I wouldn’t have expected Kyle to agree with the thesis of the book, but he is decent enough to recognize the thoroughness and… ( | 7 comments)