There has been a lot of debate recently about the contested identity of the evangelical movement in America. We have been aware for some time of the strength of the neo-Reformed reaction against the emerging movement. I wrote a piece a while back about the depressing war between Emergents and Reformed over the cross, just to give an example. But it is probably a sign of the strength of the backlash that it is now being directed at what takes itself to be mainstream evangelicalism. It was, in fact, a comment by Jim Hoag on a post about the Pyromaniacs’ hostility towards cultural engagement that drew my attention to Scot McKnight’s impassioned piece on the need for big tent evangelicals to resist the redefinition of the term. Daniel Kirk’s promulgation of a modest evangelical manifesto for the 21st century has also provided a timely response to the perceived lurch to the right.

In response to my comments on the fulfilment of prophecy it was suggested to me (by other channels) that while much of Matthew 24 can ‘with difficulty’ be made to fit exclusively into an AD 70 framework, the same cannot be said for the parables of delay in 24:36 - 25:30. In other words, Jesus must be thinking about events that will happen in our future and for which we must in the same way be prepared. I disagree, but before I say why, I want to say briefly that I regard this not as a Preterist argument but fundamentally as a defence of a historically grounded evangelicalism – as belonging to the affirmation of a thoroughly biblical understanding of the evangel as a statement, or even statements, about the historical existence of a ‘new creation’ community.

I have just come across an old and decidedly skimpy review by Kyle McDanell of The Coming of the Son of Man. Judging by the list of his favourite blogs I wouldn’t have expected Kyle to agree with the thesis of the book, but he is decent enough to recognize the thoroughness and integrity of the argument while disagreeing somewhat vaguely with the conclusions. There was not the level of ‘speculation, conversation, or ambiguity’ that he had expected to find in a book purporting to offer a ‘New Testament eschatology for an emerging church’. Much appreciated, Kyle.

Perhaps the central flaw in the Reformed reading of Romans – and why it generates such distorted definitions of key theological terms such as ‘wrath’, ‘salvation’, ‘righteousness’, ‘faith’ and ‘gospel’ – is that it sets out from the assumption that Paul is writing about the universal condition of individuals rather than the historical and contingent condition of Israel as a people. So Michael Patton’s post ‘Twelve reasons why Romans 9 is about individual election, not corporate election’ naturally caught my eye when it appeared on my blogroll.

The question of whether the early Christians were disappointed in their expectations regarding some calamitous end-of-the-world event crops up repeatedly both in academic and popular theologizing and continues to be a major factor in the modern discrediting of the New Testament. Sitting in Brussels airport the other day waiting for my friend Wes to arrive from Glasgow, I resumed my slow intermittent reading of Karen Armstrong’s book The Bible: The Biography (see also ‘A biography of the Bible and the loss of peace’) and arrived at this paragraph…

The aim behind church-planting traditionally has been to bring into existence new worshipping communities of people who believe in Jesus. Many of those people will already identify themselves as Christian; probably a much smaller number, if any, will be new converts; some will be seekers, by-standers, hangers-on. In any case, the assumption will be, generally speaking, that this is a community generated and defined by a gospel of personal salvation. Baptism into this community will be a baptism of personal salvation – a public sign that the person has repented of sin and has faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. I want to suggest that this constitutes a restrictive and in a certain sense ineffectual understanding not only of the gospel but of what it means to be an evangelical community.

I have always been somewhat in awe of the feisty visual and verbal rhetoric of the Pyromaniacs blog. I don’t go there very often – it’s the other side of town, it’s unfamiliar territory, I sense that I don’t belong there, I don’t understand the language, and frankly I’m afraid of being mugged. But this theological separationism disturbs me. Why do I feel so uncomfortable there? Why is it so hard to be understood? How are we to make sense of the mutual incomprehension expressed between, for example, those who believe that the church must re-engage with the culture and those who insist that the task is always and simply to preach the gospel to the lost – between those who are inclined to treat the world as a friend and those who view it as an enemy?