Perhaps the central flaw in the Reformed reading of Romans – and why it generates such distorted definitions of key theological terms such as ‘wrath’, ‘salvation’, ‘righteousness’, ‘faith’ and ‘gospel’ – is that it sets out from the assumption that Paul is writing about the universal condition of… (
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The question of whether the early Christians were disappointed in their expectations regarding some calamitous end-of-the-world event crops up repeatedly both in academic and popular theologizing and continues to be a major factor in the modern discrediting of the New Testament. Sitting in… (
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The aim behind church-planting traditionally has been to bring into existence new worshipping communities of people who believe in Jesus. Many of those people will already identify themselves as Christian; probably a much smaller number, if any, will be new converts; some will be seekers,… (
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I have always been somewhat in awe of the feisty visual and verbal rhetoric of the Pyromaniacs blog. I don’t go there very often – it’s the other side of town, it’s unfamiliar territory, I sense that I don’t belong there, I don’t understand the language, and frankly I… (
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I read Karen Armstrong’s biography of Muhammed while we were travelling in Iran recently and enjoyed it greatly. If we close our minds to the subsequent history of Islam and make allowances for the necessary realpolitik of the survival of the early Muslim community and the imperative… (
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My friend Wes recently sent me this quotation from Henri Nouwen:Real theological thinking, which is thinking with the mind of Christ, is hard to find in the practice of the ministry. Without solid theological reflection, future leaders will be little more than pseudo-psychologists, pseudo-… (
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This post is a response to some questions raised by Benjamin Burch on Naznet. His remarks are part of a discussion of Brian McLaren’s recommendation of The Coming of the Son of Man and of the general interest of the emerging church in Preterist, Transmillenialist, or in my case… (
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Another Xchange session at the Christian Associates Summer Connect (see also The kingdom of God as a means to an end) attempted to address the relevance (or otherwise) of Trinitarian theology for mission. This was a tough one. The different forms of Trinitarian theology that are… (
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Some brief, non-analytical but very gratifying comments (let’s be honest) on The Future of the People of God from Joel Willitts at Euangelion, including the following:Wow! Read that again. And again. Read it several times. Surely wiser words have rarely been spoken in contemporary… (
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Why is the ‘kingdom of God’ such a tricky theological notion? In a group discussion on ‘Kingdom Theology” at the Christian Associates Global Connect recently we managed to talk for some time about the topic – it’s the core of the gospel, it’s here but it’s still to… (
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I gave Andrew Jones a copy of The Future of the People of God at the Christian Associates Global Connect last week and he’s read and reviewed it already. It’s a very fair and perceptive evaluation – the remarks about the brevity of the final chapter are duly noted.Andrew also… (
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My friend Hilary has been reading The Future of the People of God and had a question about a paragraph on page 49. Since it has reference to one of the critical arguments of the book – that the parameters of Paul’s theology in the Letter are to be historically defined – I thought… (
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Brian LePort (Near Emmaus) suggests, not unreasonably, that the more pertinent question is not whether the emergent church has a problem with the doctrine of a final judgment (see previous post) but whether the emergent church still exists. I have to say, I did wonder whether I should add a… (
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A tweet from Andrew Jones (‘An original emerging church criticism: “Don’t conceive we crapper undergo Absolute Biblical Truth” ’) led me to Pastor and Author Bob DeWaay’s resolute and curiously robotic critique of the ‘Emergent Church’ on SO4J-TV. On one level the clip reinforces… (
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Here’s an interesting thought. In The Hermeneutics of Doctrine (70), as part of a discussion on ‘Christian Doctrine as Dramatic Narrative’, Thiselton notes the argument of L.L. Welborn that ‘tentmaker’ is an unlikely translation of skēnopoios in Acts 18:3. The BDAG Greek… (
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Michael Thompson correctly points out that the argument about blessing and righteousness and the Deuteronomic code would be helped if we kept in view the seminal statement in Genesis 12:3 that Israel would be blessed in order to be a blessing to the whole world. In other words, there are missional… (
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I like the church that we go to. I like its exuberance and energy and robust conviction that God is a living, dynamic, transformative, communicating, healing presence in the midst of the community. But you have to wonder about the hermeneutics sometimes. We were told this last Friday in what was,… (
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There should be a copy of J.D.G. Dunn’s Did the First Christians Worship Jesus? waiting for me when I next get back to the UK. In the meantime, I have been reading Larry Hurtado’s polemical essay-length review of the book, which contributes to the ongoing and mostly… (
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There has been a lot of fuss in the news recently about opposition to the construction of mosques in the US – from Temecula Valley to Ground Zero. The most notable piece of micro-rhetoric has been Sarah Palin’s anguished tweet regarding the proposed construction of an Islamic cultural… (
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Anthony Thiselton’s hefty book (649 pages) The Hermeneutics of Doctrine is persuading me to reconsider my instinctive distrust of a mode of theological discourse that suffers from many of the intellectual shortcomings of modern rationalism and is very often at odds with biblical… (
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