I have been rather bothered recently by the way in which the emerging church - though not only the emerging church - makes use of the concept of the ‘kingdom of God’ to define its mission, the idea being that the task of the church is to extend or… ( | 1 comment)
I have voiced some reservations in a couple of recent posts about the
appropriateness of modelling the life and mission of the church on the form of
discipleship found in the Gospels (see ‘Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways, and the future of the… ()
I suggested in my review of Alan Hirsch’s book The Forgotten Ways that, in our search for a new paradigm to replace the now more or less defunct Christendom worldview, the historical moment which we should revisit for inspiration is… ()
Jesus’ exclusivist statement about the salvation of Israel needs to be read, at least in the first place, in the context of the story that is being told. We do violence to Jesus’ intent if we cut it from that narrative and make it a universal,… ()
The ebullient Alan Hirsch was in Portugal recently with the Christian Associates leadership community, talking about what makes a missional church-planting movement, in his words, go ‘Kaboom!’ In his book The Forgotten Ways he faces… ()
This is an attempt to clarify, in response to some perceptive comments on the post ‘NT Wright and the confusion of kingdom and new creation’ (the link is to a copy of the article in this site: the original with comments can be found here), how I… ( | 13 comments)
The assertion here (and in Lk. 22:28-30) that the disciples will sit on thrones with Christ may have a quite specific reference to the eschatological narrative. In the regeneration, which refers not to the final new creation but to God’s… ()
I came across a curious paragraph in Tom Wright’s Simply Christian, in which he highlights a ‘mystery’ in the social organization of God’s ‘new world’. He argues that the end of all things is not the emigration of the righteous… ( | 1 comment)
I have recently had a very interesting conversation by email with Jonas Lundström, who for a Swede writes remarkably good English, and Graham Old (Leaving Munster). It is partly about the substance of The Coming of the Son of Man and … ()
These rudimentary comments were prompted by a conversation with Andrew Jones in Amsterdam about the eschatological significance of Jesus’ saying about moving mountains as it is found in connection with the cursing of the fig tree in Jerusalem (Mk.… ()
Everything Must Change (see the synopsis in the first part of this review) will be read by many as a challenge to the modern church to exchange an ineffectual and theologically suspect notion of what it means to be Christian for an ‘… ()
It’s three months now since Brian McLaren’s latest book Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope was released, and in the frenzied, web-driven world of emerging theology, three months is a long time. For… ()
I am pleased to say that my book has just been published by Paternoster in their ‘Faith in an Emerging Culture’ series. The book builds on the argument of The Coming of the Son of Man but broadens the scope of its historical-realist… ()
Jesus explicitly attaches a temporal limit to the validity of the Torah: ‘until all things take place (panta genētai)’. The allusion to the new heaven and earth imagery of Isaiah 65:17; 66:22 points to an eschatological-historical crisis of… ( | 1 comment)
When Jesus says that he has not come to bring peace to the land (not the ‘earth’ as in most translations) but a sword, he is speaking with the voice of the prophets. For example, Jeremiah 12:12:
Upon all the bare heights in the desert… ()
There has been some discussion of Jesus’ statement ‘It is finished’ (John 19:30) in a couple of threads on Open Source Theology (‘Tetelestai (devolved)’ and ‘Tetelestai’). It has raised some important questions, and I want to set out a bit more… ()
Tim Leeson has initiated an interesting discussion about what the emerging church really stands for, which I think merits a stab at a more comprehensive and synthesizing response. The book Emerging Churches by Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger… ( | 2 comments)
This saying presupposes the threat to their lives that the disciples would face when they announced the coming of the reign of God to Israel (cf. Matt. 10:27). If they are killed by the Jewish authorities because of their witness, they have nothing… ( | 1 comment)
The idea that Israel, as the servant of the Lord, would be a ‘light for the nations’ is found in Isaiah (42:6; 49:6; 60:3). The argument in these chapters is that YHWH will act justly with respect to his alienated people, delivering them from… ( | 2 comments)
In the context of Jesus’ address to the community of renewed Israel it makes more sense to translate gē as ‘land’ than ‘earth’. The issue here is the role of the disciples in the eschatological transition from second temple Judaism under… ()
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