Ben Witherington has taken the trouble to post a couple of comments (here and here) in response to my critique of his argument about Gehenna in his book Revelation and the End Times. He makes four points in defence of his more or less… ( | 3 comments)
The “good news” in the New Testament is really the telling of the whole story, from Jesus’ initial proclamation to Israel through to judgment on the pagan world. But it has been broken down into its component parts. This observation correlates… ( | 4 comments)
In his new book The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited Scot McKnight starts out by arguing that the “gospel” has to be distinguished from the “plan of salvation” that lies at the heart of modern evangelical theology and… ( | 12 comments)
The premise of this site is that evangelical theology is in transition and that this transition is driven by some really quite deep tectonic shifts in the way that the evangelical community understands its biblical origins. In simple terms, it… ( | 7 comments)
I have been meaning for some time to respond to some comments made by Jason Clark to the effect that the emerging church lacks a coherent ecclesiology. He was commenting on a piece I wrote four years ago asking: What does the emerging church stand… ( | 5 comments)
Doctrinal revisionism is in the air, and unsurprisingly it makes people nervous. Currently it appears that many of the fundamental tenets of modern Protestant orthodoxy are being subjected to critical re-examination from the inside—among them… ( | 28 comments)
This is another attempt to sketch the “eschatological” narrative that underlies 1 Peter and shapes the theological content of the Letter. My argument is that the eschatology—the narratively constructed future that can be extrapolated… ( | 11 comments)
During a lively dialogue with Larry Hurtado at the British New Testament Society conference this morning Jimmy Dunn put forward his well known view that there is a significant functional differentiation—even subordination—between Jesus and God in… ( | 7 comments)
Behind every letter in the New Testament there is a story. Behind Romans, for example, there is the story of communities of Gentile Christians called in Christ to be living sacrifices for the sake of the eventual victory of Israel’s God over… ( | 9 comments)
In his address to the Jews in the synagogue in Antioch of Pisidia Paul draws on three distinct passages from the Old Testament in order to say something about the resurrection of Jesus: “You are my Son, today I have begotten you” (Acts 13:33; cf. Ps… ( | 2 comments)
The basic template for New Testament belief in any sort of life after death is the Jewish idea of the resurrection of a person from the dead at the end of the age—and probably the resurrection of the righteous Jew who has lost his or her life out of… ( | 5 comments)
Here is the question: When Jesus says, “He is not God of the dead, but of the living,” does he mean that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are alive somewhere, awaiting resurrection? Those who maintain that the New Testament teaches at least a conscious… ( | 7 comments)
The traditional view is that when Christians die, they go to heaven. This notion is almost as erroneous as the view that the unsaved will be subjected to an eternity of unalloyed suffering in “hell”. Both beliefs are distortions of the… ( | 27 comments)
Murray Rae’s History and Hermeneutics is “an enquiry into how theology and history may be thought together”. This is an overriding concern of contemporary hermeneutics, and the book is an excellent contribution to the debate. But how… ( | 1 comment)
Yesterday I set out what I think are the three main ways in which—at least from a post-evangelical perspective—we may construe the relationship between the core event of Jesus’ death and resurrection and the narrative of history: the a-historical… ( | 4 comments)
I argued in “The story of how Jesus died for everyone (longer version)” that the account of Jesus’ death in Hebrews highlights both the constraints of the Jewish narrative and the importance of the martyrdom motif for soteriology. I… ( | 10 comments)
I’ve been away for a week. I was at the Christian Associates European staff conference in the charming town of Tapolca in Hungary. I’m writing this on the plane back to Dubai. Basra is somewhere below us.
The theme for the week—”Walking… ( | 7 comments)
Roger Olson is always worth reading. (Well, perhaps not always. No one is always worth reading.) He has just posted an excellent and very sympathetic piece on the emerging church movement. It feels a little bit behind the curve, but… ( | 3 comments)
I want to take the opportunity provided by a rather vexed comment on my post Tim Keller gets a lot right but gets hell badly wrong to make it clear that my narrative-historical argument about “hell” has nothing to do with liberalism.… ( | 33 comments)
Rob Bell takes the view in Love Wins that in Jesus’ day Gehenna was the “city dump”: “There was a fire there, burning constantly to consume the trash.” It is a metaphor for the terrible consequences of rejecting “the good and true and… ( | 23 comments)
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