The question of whether the Bible teaches that the unsaved will suffer an eternity of conscious torment in the fires of hell after they die is not quite the hot topic it was ten years ago, when the first edition of this book came out, but it continues to trouble a great many people. For a growing number of disillusioned “evangelicals” it’s all the reason they need finally to ditch the Bible as a compendium of antiquated, wrong-headed, and sometimes quite sinister claptrap.

I noticed recently that in response to the question “What are your favorite progressive Christian resources on the Book of Revelation?” on Twitter, a friend recommended my book The Coming of the Son of Man or “Really anything by Andrew Perriman.” Thank you, friend! His tweet got two likes, one of them by me. But I have often wondered about the appeal—or not—of my quite rigorously historical method to Progressive types.

Here is a disappointing post to celebrate a disappointing Christmas—just a dreary list of previous Christmas posts. Something might pique your interest. I had neither the time nor the imagination to come up with a new piece. It’s even too cloudy and miserable here to get a sighting of the star of Bethlehem, which is a shame because it won’t happen again for 400 years. But it’s a good time to be writing a journal article on the relation between human sin and a creation subjected to one form of futility or another.

In our age of intense ecological anxiety, Paul’s sympathetic portrayal of creation as a suffering thing, yearning for liberation from its bondage to corruption (Rom. 8:19-22) has an obvious appeal. It’s a remarkable image, but how much modern theological weight can it bear? Can it support the sort of heavy-duty prophetic response that I think is needed to undergird the mission of the church in the western context, if not globally, as we enter the Anthropocene?

Jon Hallewell asks whether I have a list of scriptures that point to the first, second, and final horizons of New Testament eschatology. I do now.

The diagram illustrates the three horizons model. I think that the narrative-historical method obliges us to read the New Testament on the assumption that two historically realistic horizons and one transcendent horizon are in view.