Paul’s exhortation to the Philippians to “work out (katergazesthe) your own salvation with fear and trembling” is a bit of a puzzle. Are we saved by works after all? Remembering the exodus, the Psalmist declares, “Yet God is our King from of old; he worked salvation (eirgasato sōtērian) in the midst of the earth” (Ps. 73:12 LXX). It would be unthinkable to instruct the Israelites in Egypt to work their own salvation. Salvation is always what God does, isn’t it?

I wrote a piece a while back about a Barna Group report on evangelism in the UK, which took the goal of evangelism to be the transformation of individuals and communities “by Jesus’ love”. I made four broad points: 1) there is no simple universal “gospel”; any decisive proclamation of good news must be historically contextualised; 2) the emphasis on encountering Jesus is narratively misplaced; 3) there’s nothing in the New Testament to suggest that evangelism means the transformation of individuals and communities through the love of Jesus; and 4) the church should pay more attention to the historically interpreted narrative of the New Testament.

I despair sometimes of the Christian captivity to dogmatic tradition. Here’s someone, for example, excitedly celebrating the fact that he has relocated from the prison of Arminianism (a relaxed, easy-going prison, but a prison nevertheless) to the stronger, more secure, and safer prison of Calvinism. Now he looks out on the sweeping landscape of Paul’s letter to the Romans through the small window of his cell, through the rigid bars of Calvinist doctrine.

What persuaded Justin Dillehay to make the move was listening to the beguiling voice of John Piper. As an Arminian he had believed that there is no one-to-one correspondence between those who are foreknown and those who are glorified. There is no guarantee that those who are called will be saved.

In the Prologue to God Untamed Johannes Hartl tells the story of being stuck on Mount Athos in northern Greece in a ferocious storm. He has spent a few days on this isolated peninsula, in the skete of St Anna, with a friend walking and praying. Now they need to get to Thessaloniki to catch a plane back to Germany, but the sea is too rough and the ferry service has been suspended.

Mount Athos, of course, is a place of prayer, a place of Orthodox monastic and strictly male isolation (even female domestic animals are banned by a 10th century charter), an otherworldly retreat from the frenetic banality of modern European life. In this story Thessaloniki is just an airport, a transit point. The restless, unpredictable sea is an ever present image for Hartl’s untamed God. “I love and fear God, as I do the sea,” he says. “I am astonished by God, as I am by the sea.”

How, Michael Bird asks, did the early church carry forward “Jesus’s appropriation of Israel’s sacred traditions about the restoration of Israel and the inclusion of the nations in God’s saving purposes”?

It’s a good question. If Jesus was a “prophet of Jewish restoration eschatology”, whose overriding—if not, exclusive objective—was the restoration of first century Israel, did his followers think that it was their responsibility to continue this mission after his death? If yes, how did they go about doing so? How did it work out? Did they succeed? Fail? Or did someone move the goalposts?

I still have a lot of marking to do, so I’ll keep this to the point again. A good friend with an interest in these matters came across Keith Giles’ argument that Paul is referring to something other than “homosexuality” in 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10. He wants to know what I think of it.

I have a lot of marking to do, so I’ll keep this to the point. In the Greek Old Testament it is God alone who rebukes the sea and calms the storm (Ps. 17:16; 103:7; 105:9; 106:28-29; Is. 50:2 LXX). So when Matthew says that Jesus “rose and rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a great calm” (Matt. 8:26), is he insinuating that Jesus is God?