Daniel Levy has written a very good, thorough, and largely sympathetic (quizzical in places rather than critical) review of The Coming of the Son of Man. He took the trouble to raise some questions with me in advance regarding the “rapture”, to which I responded in “Resurrection, rapture and relevance”.

Jim Hoag has a couple of pertinent questions about my “Postconservative evangelicalism and beyond” post—pertinent, in fact, to the point that he makes me wonder whether the piece had much in the way of substance to it at all. The first question has to do with what we understand by the “New Perspective”, the second with my nifty but perhaps vacuous metaphor of a narrative-historical hermeneutics cutting across the “dominant paradigms of modern theology at ninety degrees”.

A few pages from the end of The Deliverance of God Douglas Campbell appends a rather limp section—less than a page—on the “wrath of God” (929-30). The discussion, admittedly, concludes a chapter examining only Philippians and a smattering of “ancillary’ texts in the light of his re-reading of Paul’s argument about justification, but it seems to reflect the general tenor of the handling of the theme of wrath in the book.

I wrote a couple of weeks back about the close and defining connection in Paul’s thought between sonship and the specific theme of suffering and vindication. Paul appears to make a crucial distinction in Romans 8:16-17 between being ‘heirs of God’ (klēronomoi… theou) and being ‘fellow heirs of Christ’ (sunklēronomoi… Christou). A person is an heir of God or a child of God by virtue of having received the Spirit and being no longer subject to the condemnation of the Jewish Law. A person is an heir of Christ, however, by virtue of suffering with him in order to be glorified—in effect, raised and vindicated—with him.

I thought I had found a nice new label for myself: a ‘postconservative evangelical’. Roger Olson defines the term in Reformed and Always Reforming: The Postconservative Approach to Evangelical Theology and makes reference to it in a post on NT Wright and the New Perspective. Wright admits to being a postconservative evangelical in his book Justification.

But on further reflection, though not having read Olson’s book, I’m not sure about any ‘reformed and always reforming’ part of the definition. Wright may profess to remain loyal to the Reformation, and if that is simply a matter of not ‘smuggling “merit” back into the doctrine of salvation’, as Olson’s post rather suggests, then I have no great quarrel with it. But it seems to me that the New Perspective has the potential to subvert Reformation theologies in much more fundamental ways than this definition implies—that the narrative-historical approach cuts across the dominant paradigms of modern theology at ninety degrees, leaving the whole intellectual framework seriously weakened.

Daniel Kirk has been running an excellent series of posts on Mark 13—excellent in the sense that I agree with pretty much everything he says. For convenience I have listed his posts here, starting with the most recent: