When Jesus tells Nicodemus that he must be born again in order to see the kingdom of God (Jn. 3:3), does he have in mind the Protestant doctrine of personal regeneration? Or is he saying that Israel, represented by the devout Pharisee Nicodemus, is in need of national regeneration? Or neither? Or both?

The traditional view can be illustrated by a statement from John Piper, quoted by Mark Driscoll:

What Nicodemus needs, and what you and I need, is not religion but life. The point of referring to new birth is that birth brings a new life into the world. In one sense, of course, Nicodemus is alive. He is breathing, thinking, feeling, acting. He is a human created in God’s image. But evidently, Jesus thinks he’s dead. There is no spiritual life in Nicodemus. Spiritually, he is unborn. He needs life, not more religious activities or more religious zeal. He has plenty of that.

The Mennonite Centre Trust and the Anabaptist Network are holding a Disorganised Religion day in London on 3rd November to explore “how alternative ways of understanding the bible might help us recover how we can live distinctively in 21st Century Britain”. They will have Lloyd Pietersen there, whose book Reading the Bible After Christendom will presumably set the parameters and direction for the conversation. More details can be found on the London Mennonite Centre website.

I’ve signed up already. I don’t entirely buy the Anabaptist line—I think that we have to accept that “Christendom”, for all its failings, was in important respects the fulfilment of central New Testament hopes, not a lamentable aberration from pure New Testament ecclesiology. But the Anabaptists take the post-Christendom context much more seriously than most strands of the post-modern church, and I expect this to be a stimulating event.

I am not a universalist. I do not think that the New Testament teaches that everybody will be “saved”, though it appears that the political landscape of the new creation will be more complex than we may have thought. The framing soteriological argument in the New Testament is not that humanity needs to be saved (in a universal present) but that Israel needed to be saved (in a particular past). Individuals, whether Jews or Gentiles, were “saved” insofar as they participated in a community that would survive the wrath of God both against Israel and against the pagan world. Jesus clearly thought that few Jews would be saved. Paul presumably believed that most Gentiles were “perishing” (cf. 2 Cor. 2:15).

Ask yourself: What interest does your pastor have in the New Testament texts? What does he or she want to do with them? What does he or she need to do with them? Or if you yourself are a pastor or minister or vicar, what interest do you have professionally in the New Testament? Whom do you need to impress or persuade or instruct or keep quiet? And then ask yourself: Is it likely that your or your pastor’s interest in the New Testament matches the interest that the authors of the New Testament had in the story that they were telling? Is it likely that we have the same perspectives or presuppositions or preoccupations or pressures? No, of course not. We use the Bible in our churches and in our personal devotional life today in a manner and to an end for which as a historical text it was not designed.

I guess many people will know already that Hellbound the Movie is set for release in the US on September 21st. Kevin Miller asked me last year if I’d do an interview for it, but I was in Dubai and he was in the US, and it never happened. That was a missed opportunity. I’m now back in London, and hopefully I will get a chance to see the film here at some point.

The seemingly affable, well-read, articulate and entertaining Douglas Wilson has taken the trouble to respond in some detail to my critique of his argument about Hellenistic influence on the supposed language of “hell” in the New Testament, so I will return the favour. He who blinks first loses, whatever the exegetical rights and wrongs of the matter.

Douglas Wilson—a genial fellow by appearances, who calls himself an “evangelical, postmill, Calvinist, Reformed, and Presbyterian, pretty much in that order”—complains about the “doctrinal mischief” that is being caused by the ‘use of “Hebraic narrative” to deny the doctrine of Hell’. Daniel pointed this out and I can’t just let it slip by.