Edwin has an interesting question about the link between Jesus’ furious condemnation of the Jerusalem hierarchy and his subsequent vindication:
I have been trying to get to the point where I have my aha moment in this reframing of the biblical… ( | 2 comments)
In my previous post I had meant only to address certain questions about Jesus’ view of the “end” but thought it might be more illuminating to set Jesus’ apocalyptic teaching in Mark 13 in the context of the events of the last week in Jerusalem.… ( | 3 comments)
I started out meaning to reply to a few questions sent to me about Mark 13: Isn’t it the case that Mark places the “final apocalypse” immediately after the destruction of the temple? Doesn’t this point to a failure of prophecy? Didn’t Jesus say that… ( | 6 comments)
Here we go again.
In a response to my recent piece on James Tabor’s “failed failed apocalypse of the New Testament” argument, Edward Babinski, one of a number of vociferous ex-fundamentalist critics of conservative orthodoxies, has outlined an… ( | 9 comments)
My recently developed narrative missiological model has three main parts to it. During periods of stasis the people of God is 1) new creation and 2) royal priesthood. During periods of crisis those functions tend to be reduced, and 3) a prophetic… ( | 2 comments)
Not to put too fine a point on it, the church in the West is facing an existential crisis. Most of the remedial effort has gone into doing things differently—trying new approaches, developing ways of operating that restore confidence, find… ( | 6 comments)
The standard simplified evangelical understanding of New Testament eschatology is that Jesus will “come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,” the world will be brought to an end, all evil and death will be destroyed, and there will be a… ( | 5 comments)
Jesus’ parable of the wedding feast in Matthew 22:1-14, like the two parables preceding it, is directed against the chief priests and elders of the people who questioned his authority to pronounce judgment on the temple (Matt. 21:23-27). The leaders… ()
The Hebrew word shalom features prominently in “missional church” discourse. John Franke says, for example, in his Missional Theology: An Introduction: “The restoration of peace or shalom, the all-embracing blessing of the God of… ()
This is a story of our times, surely: a person I know slightly, trapped a while back in an evangelical Reformed seminary, drawn to the narrative-historical argument but not sure what to do with it, has now abandoned his faith, identifying as someone… ( | 3 comments)
I have Daniel Hoffman to thank for this little aperçu.
Jesus is riding on a young horse (pōlon), perhaps awkwardly on a young donkey, descending the Mount of Olives towards Jerusalem (Lk. 19:37). There is no explicit reference to Zechariah… ()
The books I’ve been reading on “missional church” have a couple of key objectives in common: to describe the progress of the Western church towards a new “missional” paradigm, and to map that paradigm on to an expansive reading of the biblical… ( | 6 comments)
A significant tranche of missional church thinking centres on the APEST paradigm. The argument is that if the church is to become a movement again after the sclerotic institutionalism of the Christendom era, it needs urgently to reactivate the gifts… ( | 2 comments)
It is clear from reading recent books on missional church that a missional theology needs to extend in two directions. It needs to extend in a social direction to encompass the existence of churches as communities interacting with… ()
If you’re looking for a primer on missional theology, John Franke’s Missional Theology: An Introduction is not a bad option. It’s clearly presented and to the point, with just five chapters on “Missional God,” “Missional Church,” “Missional… ()
John Franke’s Missional Theology: An Introduction starts with the idea associated with Karl Barth and the missiologist Karl Hartenstein that the biblical God is in his very nature a missional God. Mission is not primarily what the church… ()
I am trying to give serious thought these days to how the church goes about its “mission” (for want of a better word). The methodology is usually pragmatic: the church as it currently is, in its various institutional forms, faces challenges of… ( | 2 comments)
I have two “passions”—as far as my work goes. The first is the narrative-historical thing. I think we understand the New Testament best when we read it essentially as a prophetic-apocalyptic narrative about the concrete historical… ( | 7 comments)
I am very interested in the “eschatology” of Jesus and his followers—how they predicted future events—not only because it is the key to understanding the New Testament but also because it teaches us how to think theologically about the crises of our… ( | 2 comments)
I got to hear several good online presentations at the SBL Annual Meeting last week, including a provocative panel discussion on “Doing History and Doing Theology in the Study of Paul,” which demonstrated that the more serious fault line now is… ( | 1 comment)
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