There is an argument that the Bible is partly to blame for the current environmental crisis because humanity was instructed from the get-go to subdue the earth and have dominion over all living creatures (Gen. 1:26-28). The historian Lynn White famously argued in a 1967 article, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” that Christianity, the most anthropocentric of religions, introduced the idea of humanity’s absolute right to subjugate the natural world and “made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.”

Against this slander, Christian apologists insist that we have been created in the image of God and entrusted with the task of conserving and stewarding natural resources; there is no biblical mandate for unrestrained consumption and destruction. Insofar as this is meant as a reading of the creation story, however, it appears to rest on flimsy grounds.

I have a new book coming out with Wipf & Stock before the end of the year. It’s called In the Form of a God: The Pre-existence of the Exalted Christ in Paul. It looks like it will be the first in a new series of Studies in Early Christology, edited by Michael Bird, Scott Harrower, and David Capes. I take that as an honour.

Christopher M. Hays and C. A. Strine have proposed a solution to the problem that Jesus seemingly promised to come back within a generation and didn’t.

I follow the output of the Gospel Coalition site on the look out for material that I can use to illustrate the differences between, in this case, conservative theological readings of the New Testament and a narrative-historical reading. I do the same, naturally, for liberal-progressive thinkers, who are no more and no less at fault than their conservative counterparts in this respect. It feels a bit like trolling, but I doubt anyone notices. And my intentions are good. Here I pick on an article by Eckhard J.

There’s an odd little story about a man called Jabez lodged in the middle of the twenty-three verses that make up the list of the descendants of Judah in 1 Chronicles 4. It was made very famous twenty years ago by Bruce Wilkinson’s best-selling book The Prayer of Jabez, which exposed a fair degree of overlap between evangelical spirituality and the Word of Faith movement. I wrote in my book on prosperity theology:

What happens when Adam and Eve disobey God and eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? What are the consequences of their sin? How does it change things? The common assumption is that the “fall” is a catastrophic ontological event that corrupts not only humanity but the whole of creation—with the corollary that redemption entails the “healing” not only of humanity but of the whole of creation. I rather think that this controlling theological construct is overblown.

Shortly after the death of Jesus, two from the band of his disciples are met by the risen Christ on the road to Emmaus (Lk. 24:13-35). He asks them what they are talking about, and, a little surprised by the ignorance of the fellow, they update him on what has just transpired in Jerusalem. It would be as though someone in the UK had missed the fact that the Queen died last week.