Westbourne Grove Church, which I help to lead, is part of the Forge Sphere of churches in the south of England, which used to be part of Salt & Light, which is a network of “neocharismatic Evangelical” churches associated with the British New Church Movement.So no surprise that the Forge summer camp at beautiful Ashburnham Place in East Sussex had some serious charismatic energy to it,… (Read more...)

This is really just for fun. I was wondering whether to preach about wealth inequality next Sunday, but this is as far as I got.Jesus tells a quite elaborate story about an unnamed rich man and a poor man called Lazarus. One early manuscript gives the rich man the name Neuēs.There was a certain wealthy person, and he was wearing purple and fine linen, celebrating sumptuously every day. And a… (Read more...)

I was at the British New Testament Society conference this week, held at the magnificent St Patrick’s Pontifical University, Maynooth, in Ireland. This is the paper that I presented in the Divine Christology in Paul’s Letters session. It is a slightly updated summary of my argument in In the Form of a God: The Pre-existence of the Exalted Christ in Paul. I have not included footnotes.… (Read more...)

I suspect that “fake news” is a piece of trashy political sloganeering that will blow away when the wind next changes direction. But the larger picture is troubling: digital technologies, in different ways, on different levels, are undermining our sense of what is real. Katherine Viner wrote in the Guardian a few months back:We once talked about fake news; now it is reality itself that feels fake… (Read more...)

I think that something quite straightforward is going on when Paul writes that Jesus was en morphē theou—literally, “in form of god” (Phil. 2:6). English translations usually render this “in the form of God” or perhaps something like “in the nature of God.” But if there’s one thing that the Jewish God does not have, it’s a “form.” Only pagan gods have forms; statues of the gods, idols,… (Read more...)