Daniel Kirk asks a great question: Is Christianity really any good for the world? ‘Is the world a better place because of our allegiance to Christ? Or are all the moves toward making the world a better place done by others and baptized by us?’ What… ( | 2 comments)
[The Kindle edition is now available.]I have just noticed that The Future of the People of God: Reading Romans Before and After Western Christendom is now available on the Wipf and Stock website (also available on Amazon). I… ( | 6 comments)
I had set out to respond rather briefly to some remarks made by paulf in a comment on my “The kingdom of God: not ‘now and not yet’” post, but in the excitement that response has swollen to the proportions of a whole new post. Paulf stated: The… ( | 2 comments)
David Fitch has posted a series of articles presenting a thoughtful and constructive critique of the emerging/missional church. He looks at Peter Rollins’ deconstructionist approach to scripture and warns that it risks de-incarnationalizing… ()
It is a commonplace of Reformed and evangelical theology that the kingdom of God is ‘now and not yet’. In one sense it has already arrived; in another sense it hasn’t. According to Wikipedia the argument goes back to the Princeton Calvinist… ( | 10 comments)
What is it about theology – or perhaps, what is it about human intellectual activity generally – that makes it so hard for us to listen to each other well, read carefully what others have written, and restate each other’s views accurately? And… ()
I have been engaged in a very constructive conversation with Derek Flood about ‘Penal substitution and the OT narrative of judgment’. My argument has been roughly that in order to understand who Jesus was, what his intentions were, and in this… ( | 2 comments)
Following my post on the question of whether Jesus claimed to be God it was (indirectly) suggested to me that Jesus may have communicated his sense of divine identity through his actions rather than through his words. Despite popular… ( | 56 comments)
In his little book Is God a Delusion? Nicky Gumble (‘the pioneer of the Alpha course’) addresses Richard Dawkins’ claim that ‘There’s no good, historical evidence that Jesus ever thought he was divine’ (79-80, 127-131). It’s an… ( | 71 comments)
I have, for some time, had a bee in my bonnet about the penal substitutionary atonement debate. There are those, on the one hand, who think it sits right at the indigestible core of a sound understanding of the atoning significance of Jesus’ death;… ( | 13 comments)
Following some discussion on James McGrath’s blog about the thesis of The Coming of the Son of Man, Antonio Jerez has promised to shoot the book full of holes some time in the not too distant future. To facilitate this act of wanton… ( | 1 comment)
Stephen Fowl has written a very enjoyable, lively, lucid, little book about hermeneutics called Theological Interpretation of Scripture (2009). But I’m having a hard time accepting some of the implications of his central argument,… ( | 7 comments)
After reading a lively discussion about the ascension on James McGrath’s blog, it occurred to me that we are too quick as rationalist moderns to latch on to the question of what actually or literally or scientifically happened and can easily… ( | 2 comments)
The J. Craig Venter Institute has announced that it has successfully created the first living cell by means of man-made genetic instructions. Venter told The Times: It is our final triumph. This is the first synthetic cell. It’s the first time we… ( | 1 comment)
In his disappointing and underachieving book The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Philip Pullman has a disillusioned Jesus pray to the emptiness in Gethsemane. There are no miracles, no healings, no answers to prayer – he… ()
I have been reading a book by Cory Labanow called Evangelicalism and the Emerging Church (Ashgate, 2009) for the purpose of writing a review for the Evangelical Quarterly. The book is an ethnographical study of a rather poorly… ()
When we think of the words ‘gospel’ or ‘evangelism’, what invariably comes to mind is the church telling people (often reluctantly) that God loves them, that Jesus died for them, and that if they believe in this good news, they will have the… ( | 7 comments)
I regard myself as an evangelical, but the social and intellectual structures that have sustained and made sense of modern evangelicalism are disintegrating, and it is not at all clear that modern evangelicalism can or should survive their collapse… ( | 32 comments)
Here’s an extraordinary insight into the historical Jesus from an ancient source that is unquestionably independent of the Gospels. The historian Josephus, writing a few years after the disastrous Jewish uprising against Roman occupation,… ()
The clownfish Nemo has been netted in the open seas, just off the reef that he calls home, and imprisoned along with a number of other exotic tropical creatures in a fish tank in the office of a Sydney dentist. In addition to the humiliation of… ( | 9 comments)
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