I’ve just got back from a fascinating and at times harrowing week in Rwanda and Burundi where I took part in a gathering of ‘emerging’ African leaders, organized by Amahoro Africa. The theme of the conference was ‘The Gospel of Reconciliation’, the 1994 genocide and its aftermath being the… (
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I have been rather bothered recently by the way in which the emerging church - though not only the emerging church - makes use of the concept of the ‘kingdom of God’ to define its mission, the idea being that the task of the church is to extend or build the kingdom of God on earth. Very often there… (
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I have voiced some reservations in a couple of recent posts about the
appropriateness of modelling the life and mission of the church on the form of
discipleship found in the Gospels (see ‘Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways, and the future of the church in Europe’
and ‘We have to go back, but not to… (
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I suggested in my review of Alan Hirsch’s book The Forgotten Ways that, in our search for a new paradigm to replace the now more or less defunct Christendom worldview, the historical moment which we should revisit for inspiration is not the beginning of the narrow path of… (
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Jesus’ exclusivist statement about the salvation of Israel needs to be read, at least in the first place, in the context of the story that is being told. We do violence to Jesus’ intent if we cut it from that narrative and make it a universal, context-free, self-interpreting dogma meaning something… (
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The ebullient Alan Hirsch was in Portugal recently with the Christian Associates leadership community, talking about what makes a missional church-planting movement, in his words, go ‘Kaboom!’ In his book The Forgotten Ways he faces squarely the fact that the church in the West is… (
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This is an attempt to clarify, in response to some perceptive comments on the post ‘NT Wright and the confusion of kingdom and new creation’ (the link is to a copy of the article in this site: the original with comments can be found here), how I understand the relation between ‘kingdom of God’ and… (
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The assertion here (and in Lk. 22:28-30) that the disciples will sit on thrones with Christ may have a quite specific reference to the eschatological narrative. In the regeneration, which refers not to the final new creation but to God’s people restored following judgment (cf. Is. 65:17; 66:… (
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I came across a curious paragraph in Tom Wright’s Simply Christian, in which he highlights a ‘mystery’ in the social organization of God’s ‘new world’. He argues that the end of all things is not the emigration of the righteous to heaven but the reintegration of heaven and… (
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I have recently had a very interesting conversation by email with Jonas Lundström, who for a Swede writes remarkably good English, and Graham Old (Leaving Munster). It is partly about the substance of The Coming of the Son of Man and Re: Mission, and partly about the broader… (
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These rudimentary comments were prompted by a conversation with Andrew Jones in Amsterdam about the eschatological significance of Jesus’ saying about moving mountains as it is found in connection with the cursing of the fig tree in Jerusalem (Mk. 11:23; Matt. 21:21) and the failure of the… (
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Everything Must Change (see the synopsis in the first part of this review) will be read by many as a challenge to the modern church to exchange an ineffectual and theologically suspect notion of what it means to be Christian for an ‘emerging’ understanding that offers a credible hope of… (
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It’s three months now since Brian McLaren’s latest book Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope was released, and in the frenzied, web-driven world of emerging theology, three months is a long time. For all I know it’s not even his latest book any more… (
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I am pleased to say that my book has just been published by Paternoster in their ‘Faith in an Emerging Culture’ series. The book builds on the argument of The Coming of the Son of Man but broadens the scope of its historical-realist narrative to embrace an understanding of ‘mission’ that… (
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Jesus explicitly attaches a temporal limit to the validity of the Torah: ‘until all things take place (panta genētai)’. The allusion to the new heaven and earth imagery of Isaiah 65:17; 66:22 points to an eschatological-historical crisis of judgment and restoration that is imagined as a… (
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When Jesus says that he has not come to bring peace to the land (not the ‘earth’ as in most translations) but a sword, he is speaking with the voice of the prophets. For example, Jeremiah 12:12:
Upon all the bare heights in the desert destroyers have come, for the sword of the LORD… (
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There has been some discussion of Jesus’ statement ‘It is finished’ (John 19:30) in a couple of threads on Open Source Theology (‘Tetelestai (devolved)’ and ‘Tetelestai’). It has raised some important questions, and I want to set out a bit more carefully how I think the passage needs to be read.… (
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Tim Leeson has initiated an interesting discussion about what the emerging church really stands for, which I think merits a stab at a more comprehensive and synthesizing response. The book Emerging Churches by Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger lists nine characteristics of emerging churches:… (
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This saying presupposes the threat to their lives that the disciples would face when they announced the coming of the reign of God to Israel (cf. Matt. 10:27). If they are killed by the Jewish authorities because of their witness, they have nothing more to fear because God will watch over them (12:… (
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The idea that Israel, as the servant of the Lord, would be a ‘light for the nations’ is found in Isaiah (42:6; 49:6; 60:3). The argument in these chapters is that YHWH will act justly with respect to his alienated people, delivering them from oppression, restoring them to wholeness, and by virtue… (
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