Traditional biblical ecclesiologies mostly assume that the pattern for the life and purpose of the church is directly and sufficiently established in the account of its genesis that we have in the New Testament. Jesus gave the movement its initial… ()
Here is a good reason for taking seriously the thesis of The Coming of the Son of Man: New Testament Eschatology for an Emerging Church: it offers a neat, cogent and historically meaningful way of reconciling the conflicting views of Markus… ( | 3 comments)
In a paper on ‘The Nicene Marks in a Post-Christendom Church’ (2006) Darrell Guder discusses the challenges facing mainline Protestant churches such as the PCUSA now that ‘Christendom is over’. He thinks that there is a consensus among ‘schooled… ()
John Piper argues that the quotation of Isaiah 53:12 in Luke 22:37 is evidence that Jesus saw himself as the righteous servant who would ‘make many to be accounted righteous, and… bear their iniquities’ (Is. 53:11): ‘So in the Gospel of Luke,… ()
I like this provocative and nicely weighted take on Christian imperialism, ancient and modern, by Mark Van Steenwyk at The Jesus Manifesto. He makes the point that the Christianity we have inherited – even if we regard ourselves as dissenters – is… ()
In a sermon given at a recent ‘Together for the Gospel Conference’ John Piper asks the question, ‘Did Jesus Preach the Gospel of Evangelicalism?’ – by which he means, in effect, ‘Did Jesus Preach Paul’s Gospel?’ His expressed concern is with… ( | 6 comments)
Reading through the London School of Theology’s Open Learning module on Hermeneutics, I came across a good quotation from Richard Bauckham regarding the potential that time-honoured interpretive traditions have for creating an illusion of permanence… ()
In Brian McLaren’s better future Christianity is a force not for distrust, hatred and conflict between the world’s religions but for peace, tolerance and understanding. For most of Christian history the underlying Greco-Roman imperial… ( | 1 comment)
I can recommend an astute essay on the current state of the atonement debate by Jason Hood, who is scholar in residence at Christ UMC in Memphis.1 He makes two general points. The first – a matter of systematic theology – is that despite the… ( | 10 comments)
It comes as no surprise that when McLaren comes to address the question of how a new kind of Christianity might view the future, he starts by describing a nightmarish populist account of the end-times deeply influenced by the Greco-Roman narrative.… ()
The chapter in which Brian McLaren tackles the ‘sex question’ reaches the conclusion that a new kind of Christianity must get beyond the impasse of the modern church’s preoccupation with homosexuality and ‘begin to construct not just a more… ()
The second part of A New Kind of Christianity is called ‘Emerging and Exploring’: a number of mental doors have been opened in the first part of the book; now it is time to pass through and see what is on the other side. The sixth question… ( | 2 comments)
Brian McLaren thinks that traditional Protestantism has got the answer to the question ‘What is the Gospel?’ seriously wrong, and I agree with him. Clearly the gospel has something to do with things like atonement and justification and perhaps ‘… ()
Question number four is ‘The Jesus Question’. The previous section had concluded with the slightly illogical assertion that our evolving understanding of God must terminate in Jesus as the Word of God. But McLaren recognizes that we still have to… ()
Brian McLaren asks, thirdly, ‘Is God Violent?’ We can eliminate the effects of the Greco-Roman distortion of the biblical narrative, we can read the Bible as a library rather than as a constitution, we can bring into the focus the stories of God as… ( | 4 comments)
McLaren’s second question is ‘How Should the Bible Be Understood?’ He lists three broad reasons why we need a ‘new approach to the Bible’. First, fundamentalism in its various varieties has, to our repeated embarrassment, made the Bible an… ()
The first question has to do with the overarching storyline of the Bible by which, consciously or otherwise, we make sense of Christian existence (33-45). The traditional plot, McLaren argues, has six elements: 1) humanity begins in the perfect… ( | 1 comment)
Following the lengthy debate with Gustavo about Mark 13, I want to try to summarize what seem to me to be the main reasons for doubting that there is a fundamental shift in timeframe between Jesus’ prediction of events leading up to the desolation… ()
I wonder if we’re right to be quite so leery of the punishment aspect of the cross. I guess a lot of it has to do with not wanting to attribute vindictiveness, cruelty to God. Jesus’ death was an anticipation of the punishment of Israel – I… ()
Gustavo Martin’s excellent (though rather technical) Biblica essay on ‘Procedural Register in the Olivet Discourse’ has prompted me to look again at the place of the ‘Son of man’ section in Jesus’ prediction of future events in Mark 13.Martin… ( | 10 comments)
Recent comments