In order to distinguish his own approach from well-meaning but misguided attempts to prove that Jesus was divine, Tom Wright argues in How God Became King: Getting To The Heart Of The Gospels that the Gospels do not aim to prove… ( | 118 comments)
Yesterday we made it all the way from Dubai to Duhok, in what used to be Assyria, via Abu Dhabi and Erbil. All in all a rather uneventful journey. I got a good 80 pages into Wright’s [amazon:978-0281061464:inline], and so far I think my main… ( | 9 comments)
I have downloaded Tom Wright’s new book [amazon:0281061467:inline] and plan to read it as we travel through northern Iraq and eastern Turkey on our way home from Dubai. I am not expecting any great surprises—not in the book, at least; the… ( | 9 comments)
I will be speaking at a church in one of the labour camps Friday afternoon. My plan is to explain what Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians is all about and why it is worth taking the trouble to read it. I will stress the fact that Ephesians is a… ( | 8 comments)
Brian LePort, who regularly takes the trouble to highlight posts on this blog, for which I am very grateful, has posted a great list of the “ten most difficult doctrinal/theological subjects that contemporary Christians must address”. I don’t… ( | 27 comments)
While we’re on the subject of what people in the New Testament had to do to be saved, I notice that Larry Hurtado whose blog I highly recommend, disagrees with Tom Wright over the question of the ultimate salvation of national Israel.
Wright—… ( | 7 comments)
What did people in the New Testament have to do to be “saved”? I was prompted to ask this question by this assertion in a comment in the discussion about the sinlessness of Jesus:
Many within the orthodox evangelical world go so far as to say that… ( | 41 comments)
One of the issues raised by the lengthy discussion about the designation of Jesus as a high priest after the order of Melchizedek is that of Jesus’ “sinlessness”. Traditionally we have understood this in what I suppose are general existential or… ( | 35 comments)
One of the arguments put forward by those who wish to find the divinity of Jesus under every stone is that as a “priest forever after the order of Melchizedek” (Heb. 5:6; 6:20; 7:17) Jesus must have been both God and man. This is a misunderstanding… ( | 73 comments)
A key part of the broad “thesis” that I am putting forward on this blog and in my books is the observation that the New Testament texts reflect a consistently apocalyptic outlook. What I mean by this, essentially, is that the whole story… ( | 35 comments)
This morning’s Good Friday sermon focused on four aspects of the atoning function of the cross: propitiation, redemption, justification, and reconciliation. The sermon had a strong evangelistic slant, and it’s not at all surprising that… ( | 16 comments)
I imagine Andrew Sullivan’s Newsweek cover article on Christianity in Crisis will attract a great deal of interest. He castigates the modern church in all its forms for its corruption, hypocrisy, loss of moral authority, materialism,… ( | 12 comments)
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, we do not need a theory of the atonement. Theories of the atonement are nothing but excess intellectual furniture. We can’t move in here at the moment because the place is… ( | 7 comments)
As I would redefine the term from a narrative-historical perspective, an “evangelical” in the broadest sense is someone who finds “good news” in the long and complex story of the historic family of Abraham, descended through Jesus. Or better, the… ( | 10 comments)
In my post on the Gentiles and the Holy Spirit I made the remark that Cornelius is described as a ‘pious man, who feared God, who prayed continually; a righteous and God-fearing man, who was “well spoken of by the whole Jewish nation”’ (Acts 10:2,… ( | 11 comments)
Daniel Kirk wrote a piece recently about Christians “being greater than angels”, looking at Paul’s enigmatic remarks in 1 Corinthians 6:1-3 about the saints judging not only the world but also angels. It’s a short piece, and the… ( | 8 comments)
In the garden of Gethsemane, shortly before his arrest, Jesus becomes “greatly distressed and troubled” and says to his disciples, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death. Remain here and watch.” He moves some distance from them, falls to the… ( | 14 comments)
I’m currently in Sulaymaniyah in the Autonomous Region of Kurdistan in northern Iraq with my wife, meeting some extraordinary people who are doing some extraordinary things. I say that partly to impress, partly to explain why I’ve been a… ( | 5 comments)
I have argued that “salvation” in the context of Peter’s sermons in the early chapters of Acts means the salvation of at least some part of Israel from the coming disaster of the war against Rome, the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple,… ( | 8 comments)
I argued with respect to Pentecost that the outpouring of the Spirit was interpreted by Peter as an eschatological rather than ecclesiological phenomenon. It was a sign—not least because the Spirit was experienced as a power to speak prophetically—… ( | 2 comments)
Recent comments