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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My book The Future of the People of God: Reading Romans Before and After Western Christendom has just become available at Amazon.com. Backcover information about the book can be found in this post. (
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Daniel Kirk asks a great question: Is Christianity really any good for the world? ‘Is the world a better place because of our allegiance to Christ? Or are all the moves toward making the world a better place done by others and baptized by us?’ What prompted the soul-searching was the observation… (
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[The Kindle edition is now available.]I have just noticed that The Future of the People of God: Reading Romans Before and After Western Christendom is now available on the Wipf and Stock website (also available on Amazon). I haven’t actually got my own hands on a copy yet… (
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I had set out to respond rather briefly to some remarks made by paulf in a comment on my “The kingdom of God: not ‘now and not yet’” post, but in the excitement that response has swollen to the proportions of a whole new post. Paulf stated: The imminent kindgom of God, which was a new world… (
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David Fitch has posted a series of articles presenting a thoughtful and constructive critique of the emerging/missional church. He looks at Peter Rollins’ deconstructionist approach to scripture and warns that it risks de-incarnationalizing the Word of God; he raises concerns… (
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It is a commonplace of Reformed and evangelical theology that the kingdom of God is ‘now and not yet’. In one sense it has already arrived; in another sense it hasn’t. According to Wikipedia the argument goes back to the Princeton Calvinist theologian Gerhardus Vos. Some sort of ‘now and not… (
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What is it about theology – or perhaps, what is it about human intellectual activity generally – that makes it so hard for us to listen to each other well, read carefully what others have written, and restate each other’s views accurately? And then, what is it that makes us so cross,… (
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I have been engaged in a very constructive conversation with Derek Flood about ‘Penal substitution and the OT narrative of judgment’. My argument has been roughly that in order to understand who Jesus was, what his intentions were, and in this particular case how his suffering might be understood… (
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Following my post on the question of whether Jesus claimed to be God it was (indirectly) suggested to me that Jesus may have communicated his sense of divine identity through his actions rather than through his words. Despite popular assumptions to the contrary, Jesus’ miracles in… (
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In his little book Is God a Delusion? Nicky Gumble (‘the pioneer of the Alpha course’) addresses Richard Dawkins’ claim that ‘There’s no good, historical evidence that Jesus ever thought he was divine’ (79-80, 127-131). It’s an old debate, of course, and neither Dawkins nor… (
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I have, for some time, had a bee in my bonnet about the penal substitutionary atonement debate. There are those, on the one hand, who think it sits right at the indigestible core of a sound understanding of the atoning significance of Jesus’ death; and there are those, on the other, who think it… (
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Following some discussion on James McGrath’s blog about the thesis of The Coming of the Son of Man, Antonio Jerez has promised to shoot the book full of holes some time in the not too distant future. To facilitate this act of wanton destruction I have copied below an initial criticism made by… (
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Stephen Fowl has written a very enjoyable, lively, lucid, little book about hermeneutics called Theological Interpretation of Scripture (2009). But I’m having a hard time accepting some of the implications of his central argument, which is that priority should be given to theology (… (
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After reading a lively discussion about the ascension on James McGrath’s blog, it occurred to me that we are too quick as rationalist moderns to latch on to the question of what actually or literally or scientifically happened and can easily omit to ask what Luke understood the meaning… (
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The J. Craig Venter Institute has announced that it has successfully created the first living cell by means of man-made genetic instructions. Venter told The Times: It is our final triumph. This is the first synthetic cell. It’s the first time we have started with information in a computer, used… (
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In his disappointing and underachieving book The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Philip Pullman has a disillusioned Jesus pray to the emptiness in Gethsemane. There are no miracles, no healings, no answers to prayer – he cannot keep making promises that God never fulfils… (
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