Recent posts

But what I really want to know is how to get to heaven...
I have been reading a book by Cory Labanow called Evangelicalism and the Emerging Church (Ashgate, 2009) for the purpose of writing a review for the Evangelical Quarterly. The book is an ethnographical study of a rather poorly camouflaged Vineyard congregation in the UK that has… ( | 0 comments)
What is the good news that is announced in the New Testament?
When we think of the words ‘gospel’ or ‘evangelism’, what invariably comes to mind is the church telling people (often reluctantly) that God loves them, that Jesus died for them, and that if they believe in this good news, they will have the assurance of eternal life, by which is usually meant life… ( | 7 comments)
The narrative premise of a post-Christendom theology
I regard myself as an evangelical, but the social and intellectual structures that have sustained and made sense of modern evangelicalism are disintegrating, and it is not at all clear that modern evangelicalism can or should survive their collapse. My broad aim as a theologian is to endeavour to… ( | 32 comments)
Who was Jesus?
Here’s an extraordinary insight into the historical Jesus from an ancient source that is unquestionably independent of the Gospels. The historian Josephus, writing a few years after the disastrous Jewish uprising against Roman occupation, describes Jesus as a rustic from the provinces who… ( | 0 comments)
How to rescue Romans from the fish tank of Reformed theology and return it to the sea of history
The clownfish Nemo has been netted in the open seas, just off the reef that he calls home, and imprisoned along with a number of other exotic tropical creatures in a fish tank in the office of a Sydney dentist. In addition to the humiliation of their captivity, they face the threat of being bagged… ( | 9 comments)
Imagining an emerging ecclesiology
Traditional biblical ecclesiologies mostly assume that the pattern for the life and purpose of the church is directly and sufficiently established in the account of its genesis that we have in the New Testament. Jesus gave the movement its initial impetus by calling and teaching the first disciples… ( | 0 comments)
Did St. Paul Go to Heaven When He Died? Reconciling Bockmuehl and Wright...
Here is a good reason for taking seriously the thesis of The Coming of the Son of Man: New Testament Eschatology for an Emerging Church: it offers a neat, cogent and historically meaningful way of reconciling the conflicting views of Markus Bockmuehl and NT Wright, though admittedly in a… ( | 3 comments)
The mission of the church after Christendom
In a paper on ‘The Nicene Marks in a Post-Christendom Church’ (2006) Darrell Guder discusses the challenges facing mainline Protestant churches such as the PCUSA now that ‘Christendom is over’. He thinks that there is a consensus among ‘schooled observers’ that a fundamental paradigm shift is… ( | 0 comments)
Numbered with the transgressors
John Piper argues that the quotation of Isaiah 53:12 in Luke 22:37 is evidence that Jesus saw himself as the righteous servant who would ‘make many to be accounted righteous, and… bear their iniquities’ (Is. 53:11): ‘So in the Gospel of Luke, the way Jesus saves is by shedding his blood and… ( | 0 comments)
Mark Van Steenwyk and the inferiority of Christianity
I like this provocative and nicely weighted take on Christian imperialism, ancient and modern, by Mark Van Steenwyk at The Jesus Manifesto. He makes the point that the Christianity we have inherited – even if we regard ourselves as dissenters – is the product of imperialism in one form or another,… ( | 0 comments)
John Piper and the gospels of Jesus and Paul
In a sermon given at a recent ‘Together for the Gospel Conference’ John Piper asks the question, ‘Did Jesus Preach the Gospel of Evangelicalism?’ – by which he means, in effect, ‘Did Jesus Preach Paul’s Gospel?’ His expressed concern is with the argument of critical scholarship ‘that Jesus’… ( | 6 comments)
Richard Bauckham and the Western Christian tradition (briefly)
Reading through the London School of Theology’s Open Learning module on Hermeneutics, I came across a good quotation from Richard Bauckham regarding the potential that time-honoured interpretive traditions have for creating an illusion of permanence and absoluteness: The sheer length and continuity… ( | 0 comments)
Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity: the question about other religions
In Brian McLaren’s better future Christianity is a force not for distrust, hatred and conflict between the world’s religions but for peace, tolerance and understanding. For most of Christian history the underlying Greco-Roman imperial mindset has generated 1) anxiety, 2) paranoia, 3) a… ( | 1 comment)
Penal substitutionary atonement and narrative theology
I can recommend an astute essay on the current state of the atonement debate by Jason Hood, who is scholar in residence at Christ UMC in Memphis.1 He makes two general points. The first – a matter of systematic theology – is that despite the sustained scholarly and sub-scholarly onslaught against… ( | 10 comments)
Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity: A better way of viewing the future?
It comes as no surprise that when McLaren comes to address the question of how a new kind of Christianity might view the future, he starts by describing a nightmarish populist account of the end-times deeply influenced by the Greco-Roman narrative. The dangers of a dispensationalist eschatology are… ( | 0 comments)
Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity: the question about sexuality
The chapter in which Brian McLaren tackles the ‘sex question’ reaches the conclusion that a new kind of Christianity must get beyond the impasse of the modern church’s preoccupation with homosexuality and ‘begin to construct not just a more humane sexual ethic in particular, but a more honest… ( | 0 comments)
Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity: What Do We Do About the Church?
The second part of A New Kind of Christianity is called ‘Emerging and Exploring’: a number of mental doors have been opened in the first part of the book; now it is time to pass through and see what is on the other side. The sixth question is ‘What Do We Do About the Church?’ Most of our… ( | 2 comments)
Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity: What is the Gospel?
Brian McLaren thinks that traditional Protestantism has got the answer to the question ‘What is the Gospel?’ seriously wrong, and I agree with him. Clearly the gospel has something to do with things like atonement and justification and perhaps ‘penal substitution’, but they have been misleadingly… ( | 0 comments)
Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity: the fourth question about Jesus
Question number four is ‘The Jesus Question’. The previous section had concluded with the slightly illogical assertion that our evolving understanding of God must terminate in Jesus as the Word of God. But McLaren recognizes that we still have to make it clear which Jesus we are talking about: ‘We… ( | 0 comments)
Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity: the question about the violence of God
Brian McLaren asks, thirdly, ‘Is God Violent?’ We can eliminate the effects of the Greco-Roman distortion of the biblical narrative, we can read the Bible as a library rather than as a constitution, we can bring into the focus the stories of God as good creator, passionate liberator, and… ( | 4 comments)