In some reflections on an essay by Darrell Bock in the recent Howard Marshall festschrift Michael Bird makes the comment: “I seriously wonder if we have two competing gospel visions in evangelicalism.”

He quotes a couple of paragraphs from Bock’s essay which make the point that whereas the gospel that is mostly preached in the church today is about forgiveness of sins, what Peter’s sermon in Acts 2 highlights is “not so much how Jesus saves us, but where that act of saving takes us”—namely, to a restored covenantal relationship with God in the Spirit, as prefigured in Jeremiah. In fact, Bock maintains, nothing at all is said about forgiveness or the atoning function of Jesus’ death in Acts 2.

I don’t want to make this too much a Q&A type blog, but when good questions come up in the comments, it seems a shame to waste them. This one from Mitchell Powell gets at a problem which is often reckoned to be the Achilles heel of narrative-historical approaches to the New Testament, though perhaps from a different angle to usual.

Scot McKnight has provoked copious debate on Jesus Creed in characteristically economical fashion by asking people what they think of the eight marks of a “true church”, by which is meant a church that conforms to the teachings of the New Testament, as defined by Mark Driscoll:

• The church is made up of regenerated believers in Jesus
• The church is organized under qualified leadership
• The church gathers to hear preaching and to respond in worship
• The church rightly administers the sacraments
• The church is spiritually unified
• The church is holy
• The church is devoted to fellowship
• The church is committed to Jesus’ mission

I picked up a discounted copy of Roger Olson’s A-Z of Evangelical Theology (SCM, 2005) in the London School of Theology book shop earlier in the week. A central theme of the book that I am currently working on will be the kingdom of God and how to live with it, so I had a look at Roger’s brief article on the topic (226-27). He notes, first, that some evangelicals take the Augustinian view that the kingdom of God “exists secretly in the world wherever the true church of Jesus Christ worships and serves”. The kingdom is spiritual, not to be identified with any “historical socio-political arrangement”, and will only be fulfilled “in the eschaton, when Christ returns triumphantly to establish it in the heavenly city, the new Jerusalem”. So the kingdom is “already”, exhibited in the life of the church, and “not yet”, to be fulfilled in the “visible rule of Christ over creation after his return to earth”.

I am sitting in the library at the London School of Theology trying to cobble together a book proposal. Looking for distraction I have just pulled off the shelf beside me The Wicket Gate by G.A. Studdert Kennedy, first published in 1923. Opening the book more or less at random I happened upon this entertaining comment on the lines “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, and Giver of Life, Who proceedeth from the Father and the Son” from the Nicene Creed….

Steven Opp has drawn attention to the argument of W.G.T. Shedd in The Doctrine of Endless Punishment that Sheol in the Old Testament (Hades in the Greek Old Testament) is not merely the grave but a place of endless punishment for the wicked, in part, at least, on the grounds that there are passages which suggest an alternative destination for the righteous. The passages in question are Psalms 16:11; 17:15; 49:15; 73:24 and Proverbs 14:32. On a superficial reading of these isolated verses Shedd’s argument looks plausible. But if context and the underlying Hebrew text are taken into consideration, that plausibility disintegrates rather easily.

I have suggested in The Coming of the Son of Man and on this blog that the story of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19-31 is not intended to provide factual information about the afterlife but rather belongs to Jesus’ critique of a complacent elite in Israel that served mammon rather than God (cf. Lk. 16:13-14). It is, in effect, a parable for the coming eschatological reversal of fortunes in Israel, when the hungry would be filled with good things and the rich would be sent empty away. This argument allows me to hold to my view that Jesus did not teach the existence of “hell” as a place of eternal conscious torment; rather he warned disobedient Israel, and especially the various political-religious elites, that they faced divine judgment in the form of invasion, war, slaughter, and the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple. The disposal of the dead in the valley of the sons of Hinnom—that is Gehenna—stands as a metonymy for the appalling suffering and loss of life that would accompany the siege of Jerusalem. It is not an image for suffering after death.

But the question was recently put to me: If that’s the case, why did Jesus tell a story about the afterlife in order to make such a mundane historical point? It’s a good question.