I’ve been greatly enjoying an intermittent conversation with Tim Peebles of the Anvil Trust about the relation between kingdom and new creation or shalom themes in scripture. We both have trouble getting our point across succinctly, so my… ()
The practical question that I’m trying to answer here is: how do we assess the effectiveness or validity of missional activity when the “product” is more qualitative than quantitative? Church growth models are proved effective if they result in… ( | 2 comments)
Prompted by an excellent podcast that I listened to yesterday discussing the relation between the kingdom of God and “shalom” in scripture, I want to look briefly at Isaiah 9:6-7.
The passage speaks of the birth of a child who will sit on the… ( | 2 comments)
I work with an international mission organisation called Communitas. We have a small presence in the UK, and if anyone wants to know more about us, please get in touch. This is the personal background for the question that I want to address in a… ( | 14 comments)
The relevance of Psalm 107:28-29 for understanding Jesus’ imperious rebuke of the wind and waves is often noted: some went down to the sea in ships; the Lord “commanded and raised the stormy wind, which lifted up the waves of the sea”; they were… ( | 2 comments)
Speaking at Davos last year, David Attenborough said, “The Holocene has ended. The Garden of Eden is no more.” He makes the point again in the compelling new Netflix documentary A Life on Our Planet.The juxtaposition of terms from two very different… ( | 18 comments)
Does Paul say that Christ is God in Romans 9:5? He speaks with candour about his anxiety regarding the future of Israel. He could wish himself “anathema from the Messiah” for the sake of his own race according to the flesh, of whom are “the glory… ( | 1 comment)
On The Gospel Coalition site Phil Thompson asks what Paul means when he says, “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (Col… ( | 6 comments)
Andrew Bunt provides a quick and lucid overview of the argument of Oren Martin’s book Bound for the Promised Land: The land promise in God’s redemptive plan (2015). I have not read the book. Martin thinks—assuming that Bunt has understood… ()
I have been reading Eric Mason’s book Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice. It’s not the book I was expecting it to be. It’s an honest, heartfelt attempt, written from within the black… ( | 5 comments)
Following on from the discussion of whether Paul includes Jesus in the divine identity in 1 Corinthians 8:6, let’s consider the claim that Paul identifies Jesus with YHWH when he says, “Shall we provoke the Lord to jealousy (parazēloumen)?… ( | 5 comments)
A lot of scholars think that Paul includes Jesus in the “divine identity” when he says that “for us there is one God, the Father… and one Lord, Jesus Christ…” (1 Cor. 8:6). Richard Bauckham, for example, notes that it is now “commonly recognized”… ( | 17 comments)
Matthew Hartke describes himself on Twitter as a “Post-Christian Bible nerd endlessly fascinated with the historical Jesus and the origins of Christianity.” I had a bit of a debate with him a few years back in an Unbelievable podcast about whether… ()
Here are three missional challenges that the modern evangelical church needs urgently to get to grips with: 1) resist the extreme individualism and narcissism of western culture; 2) tell a compelling, up-to-date-and-beyond story about the living God… ( | 4 comments)
Writing to Timothy, Paul (presumably) says that a woman should learn quietly in all submissiveness and not be allowed to teach and “exert influence over” (authentein) men because “Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived,… ()
Jesus did not tell moral fables. He was not a purveyor of uplifting Christian allegories that transcend time and space. He was a prophet in the mould of Isaiah or Ezekiel, telling disturbing, and sometimes deliberately disorienting, stories about… ()
I rather overlooked the relevance of Jesus’ parable about an unforgiving slave in Matthew 18:23-35 for the recent debate about whether he interpreted the foreseen destruction of Jerusalem as God’s deliberate punishment of his people.
When should… ( | 3 comments)
Much of Jesus’ Galilean ministry centred on Capernaum, so it comes as something of a shock to hear him denounce the city in rather forthright terms while things still appear to be going well. Admittedly, a warning note is struck early on when the… ( | 5 comments)
I have argued that a “day of the Lord” in biblical terms happens not at the end of history but in history. It is a day when the God of Israel steps in to “judge” or “put right” a bad situation—to punish impiety and injustice, to deliver his… ( | 19 comments)
In the popular Christian mind any reference to the “day of the Lord” or the “day of judgment” is likely to be conceived in final terms, as a transcendent event at the end of history. So when Paul says to the men of Athens that God has “fixed a day… ( | 18 comments)
Recent comments