This is a close examination of the place of Romans 3:24-25 in Paul’s argument about the fate of the Jews in chapter 3 as a whole. It is a response to objections made to my post on atonement that when Paul speaks here of a redemption in Christ Jesus, etc., he does not discriminate between Jews and Gentiles, that the atonement referenced by the word hilastērion is directly for all humanity. My view is that this traditional reading of these verses can be sustained only if we remove them from their context in Romans and make use of them as a prooftext for salvation in Christ, which of course we do all the time.

There is no question that Pentecost is a “wondrous and challenging feast”, which should put “to the lie a lazy, sleepy, hidden, and tepid Christian life”. I quote from a Meditation on the Feast of Pentecost by Msgr. Charles Pope of the Archdiocese of Washington. But the Monsignor then sharpens the stick with which he means to prod the lazy, sleepy Christian by invoking Jesus’ dramatic statement in Luke 12:49: “I came to cast fire on the earth, and would that it were already kindled!” Pope comments: “This is a feast about fire, about a transformative, refining, and purifying fire that the Lord wants to kindle in us and in this world.” In general post-biblical terms that may be right, but it gains its contemporary relevance at the expense of a narrative-historical understanding of the passage.

My very good friends Rogier and Christine have responded to my post Kingdom of God: who, what, when, and how? with a number of pertinent questions. I have tried to answer all of them thoroughly, but the result is a rather long post. So if your name is not Rogier or Christine, you may want to skip it. In fact, when you see how long and abstruse it is, you may want to skip it even if your name is Rogier or Christine.

I’m picking my way slowly through the beguiling, breezy woodland of Rob Bell’s Love Wins. But to be honest, so far I have been more interested in the trees than the wood. If you look at some of them close up, with the slightly obsessive eye of a botanist rather than the casual glance of a happy-go-lucky rambler, they don’t quite make sense. Push them, and they seem not to be securely rooted. Push hard enough and they sometimes fall over. To give an example….