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?

One of the biggest intellectual challenges facing modern evangelicalism—a movement that professes to adhere to both scripture and tradition—is how to reconcile a commitment to a rationally constructed trinitarianism with the dominant apocalyptic narrative about Jesus which we find in the New Testament. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it’s difficult.

Here’s an example. John Piper notices that according to Matthew 28:18 Jesus says after the resurrection that all authority in heaven and earth has been given to him. But surely Jesus is God, so he must have had this authority “even in eternity past”. We know this from the opening words of John’s Gospel: Jesus was the Word who was God in the beginning, through whom all things were made. So why did Jesus need to be given an authority that he already had?

The promise to Abraham in Genesis 12:1-3 is that his descendants will be given a land where they will become a great and prosperous nation (goy), that they will be blessed by God, and that for this reason they will be a blessing to all communities of the earth.

And the Lord said to Abram, “Go out from your land and from your kindred and from your father’s house to the land which I will show to you. And I will make you to be a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, and be a blessing. And I will bless those blessing you, and the person who despises you I will curse, and all the communities of the earth (ʾadamah) will find blessing in you.” (My translation)