Immediately after his baptism, Jesus is led by the Spirit to re-enact Israel’s journey through the wilderness. He is not “tempted” by the “tempter” but “tested” (peirasthēnai) by the “tester” (ho peirazōn), just as God led Israel… ()
In their revision of Richard Hays’ formerly negative stance on same-sex relationships (see the chapter on homosexuality in The Moral Vision of the New Testament), Christopher Hays and his father claim to have found in scripture a… ()
Discussing Robert P. Jones’ book Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy, David Smith writes in the Guardian:Faced with shrinking numbers and cultural marginalisation, white evangelicalism… ()
The little book Why Jesus? is part of the materials for the Alpha Course. In it, Nicky Gumbel writes:Jesus is the only man who has ever chosen to be born, and he is one of the few who has chosen to die. He said that the entire reason for… ( | 3 comments)
Westbourne Grove Church, which I help to lead, is part of the Forge Sphere of churches in the south of England, which used to be part of Salt & Light, which is a network of “neocharismatic Evangelical” churches associated with the British New… ()
This is really just for fun. I was wondering whether to preach about wealth inequality next Sunday, but this is as far as I got.Jesus tells a quite elaborate story about an unnamed rich man and a poor man called Lazarus. One early manuscript gives… ()
I was at the British New Testament Society conference this week, held at the magnificent St Patrick’s Pontifical University, Maynooth, in Ireland. This is the paper that I presented in the Divine Christology in Paul’s Letters session. It is a… ( | 1 comment)
I suspect that “fake news” is a piece of trashy political sloganeering that will blow away when the wind next changes direction. But the larger picture is troubling: digital technologies, in different ways, on different levels, are undermining our… ()
I think that something quite straightforward is going on when Paul writes that Jesus was en morphē theou—literally, “in form of god” (Phil. 2:6). English translations usually render this “in the form of God” or perhaps something like “in… ( | 2 comments)
In the Christian West, in the pre-modern world, the parish church met the religious needs of people living in the parish. It was necessitated by and sustained by a culture that had been in place, in one form or another, since the conversion… ()
The relationship between Jesus and Paul is much disputed. You will often hear people say that Paul turned the generous, kind, and progressive religion of Jesus into a monstrous theological and ecclesiastical system from which we are still recovering… ( | 14 comments)
A narrative-historical approach brings into view the large-scale, national and civilisational events and processes that frame “theological” reflection. What it comes down to is that we cannot properly understand Jesus without taking into account the… ()
The standard evangelical response to the climate crisis is that the church should preach and practice creation care as a witness to the good news about Jesus. In that respect, in the words of the Evangelical Alliance in the UK, we should understand… ()
We screened the People’s Emergency Briefing film in the week before this message, so the climate crisis loomed menacingly. In the film, Jennifer Saunders of Absolutely Fabulous fame asks a good question: “What’s the matter with us?” What is the… ()
For most of us, subjectively, the everyday experience of being human probably hasn’t changed very much, but we may be aware of a storm of questions blowing furiously outside the house, rattling the windows and loosening tiles. What does it mean to… ()
The consumption of the planet’s resources—food, land, natural materials, fossil fuels—and the failure to deal with the waste products are central characteristics of modern societies. Scientific progress, technological ingenuity, and cheap energy… ()
In a Substack post, Brian Zahnd looks at four key theological “entities” and warns of the “theological mischief” that happens when the “critical distinction” between them is not properly respected. The Church, the Bible, and the religion of… ()
The term “polycrisis” gets used a lot these days to name a peculiar consequence of globalisation: the collision of expanding systems in shock—energy, climate, geo-politics, finance, etc., with AI accelerating the chaos—in a confined planetary space.… ( | 2 comments)
In the last paragraph of the Gospel of Matthew, the risen Jesus is “worshipped” by his disciples, whom he sends into the world to baptise new disciples “in the name of Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 28:16-20). This has been a… ( | 1 comment)
In chapter three of Jesus and the Powers, N. T. Wright and Michael Bird explain how they understand the “powers” of the book’s title. They are “what we would call ‘earthly’ or ‘political’ rulers and what we might call any ‘non-human’ or ‘… ()
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