The three stories told in Luke 15 about something or someone that is lost and then found are not about us, were not addressed to us, were not written for us. They are certainly not vehicles of a universal evangelistic message about lost sinners who… ()
I have to prepare some material about discipleship for a small leaders’ retreat. The approach I want to take is to frame discipleship narrative-historically. No surprises there. One way to do this is to take a very practical letter… ( | 5 comments)
The basic thesis of Greg Beale’s A New Testament Biblical Theology is i) that the Old Testament gives us the story of how God “progressively reestablishes his new-creational kingdom out of chaos”; and ii) that this storyline is… ( | 14 comments)
I argued a few weeks back that the “son of man” figure in Daniel 7:13-14 is not an individual messiah or an angel or divine hypostasis (i.e., a manifestation of some aspect of the godhead) but symbolically represents that part of Israel which… ( | 7 comments)
The scribes claim that Jesus casts out demons by the prince of demons, and Jesus says that’s a stupid accusation to make because it would mean that Satan is fighting against himself. He then puts to them a little parable, the point of which… ( | 2 comments)
In a series of talks at the Communitas International (formerly known as Christian Associates) staff conference in Budapest recently Greg Boyd argued 1) that American Christianity has been compromised and corrupted by its close association with state… ( | 7 comments)
What is the mission of the church? Conservatives will say that the mission of the church, at core, is to save people. Other activities, no matter how laudable, are secondary to this task because there is nothing more important than a person… ( | 8 comments)
Who is the “one like a son of man” who comes with the clouds of heaven to be presented before the Ancient of Days in Daniel 7:13? Collins calls it “perhaps the most celebrated question in all the apocalyptic literature”.J.J. Collins, The… ( | 16 comments)
Larry Hurtado has uploaded a pre-publication version of his contribution to a response to N.T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God. As the fashion goes these days (How Jesus Became God / How God Became Jesus)… ( | 12 comments)
A question about the relation of my narrative-historical reading of New Testament eschatology to postmillennialism led me to the Wikipedia article (along with other fine resources), which has a simple diagram illustrating the four main species of… ( | 8 comments)
My reply to a question from Ian Paul (see his excellent Psephizo blog) got out of hand, so I’ve posted it separately here. Ian thinks that my argument about the “age to come” being now and in history smacks of a discredited postmillennialism and… ( | 4 comments)
In Paul and the Faithfulness of God N.T. Wright locates Paul’s eschatology firmly in a Jewish hope, rooted in scripture, “not just for an individual future after death, but for a restoration and renewal of the whole nation, and perhaps… ( | 5 comments)
A couple of recent tweets from The Gospel Coalition raise the question of the place of suffering both in the New Testament narrative and in Christian experience. The first is an unattributed quotation, though I’m betting it’s John Piper: “Suffering… ( | 7 comments)
What is primarily said about Jesus in Hebrews 1 is that he is the Son whom God has “appointed the heir of all things”. After making purification for Israel’s sins—not the sins of the world—he “sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on… ( | 1 comment)
As much out of morbid curiosity as anything, I have been following the intra-Reformed debate over the eternal subordination of the Son rather closely. Posts, counter-posts and counter-counter-posts from some hard-hitting theologians have been… ( | 5 comments)
Following on from yesterday’s piece on “The subordination of the Son, and why it has nothing to do with gender”….In response to accusations that his subordinationist Trinitarianism is a departure from orthodoxy Bruce Ware, who is … ( | 4 comments)
There has been a furious flurry of posts (see below) from various directions this week laying into the argument of some neo-Calvinists (Wayne Grudem prominent among them) that the eternal subordination of the woman to the man is directly… ( | 1 comment)
Craig Keener, who certainly knows a thing or two, has written a piece on Jesus Creed reaffirming the common egalitarian argument that Paul prefaces the instructions to husbands and wives in Ephesians 5:22-33 with an exhortation to mutual submission… ( | 1 comment)
An opinion piece in the Guardian last week asked, “Is the end of western Christianity in sight?” On the strength of the most recent British Social Attitudes data the article asserted that “No religion” is now by far the largest self-identification… ( | 10 comments)
Keen to avoid being condemned for the “heresy” of Apocalyptic-Inflationism and to “maintain narrative orthodoxy”, James asks what he should do with passages such as Revelation 21:3-5:And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying… ( | 7 comments)
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