1. Let’s be blunt. Christmas has nothing to do with God coming to earth as a helpless babe to save humanity from sin, etc. That is another matter, it’s not what’s being said, it’s not the burden of the stories in Matthew and Luke. These narrate the birth of a king who will deliver first century Israel from a national crisis. When the angel says to Joseph that Mary’s son will “save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21), he means that Jesus will save Israel from the concrete social-political-religious transgressions that have brought the nation to the brink of catastrophe.

Here’s a good opportunity to defend a more or less egalitarian reading of Genesis 1-3. An older piece by Alastair Roberts on the differences between men and women in creation has recently been published in abridged form on the 9Marks site. The first two sections consist of a complementarian reading of the two creation narratives; the third offers a somewhat tempered application of the reading to the modern context. I think that Roberts reads too much into the texts and unnecessarily absolutizes the patriarchalism that was introduced by the fall.

Two recent articles on the Gospel Coalition website ask whether missionaries should target unreached people groups. Darren Carlson and Elliot Clark argue that the strategy rests on a faulty assumption: that the ethnē in Matthew 24:14; 28:19 are not “ethnolinguistic” groups as understood by modern anthropologists but the nations referenced in the promise to Abraham that all the families or tribes of the earth would be blessed through him (Gen. 12:3). Matthew Newkirk agrees that the table of nations in Genesis 10 is in view but holds that the list includes “both tribal and linguistic dimensions, evident by the use of the Hebrew term mishpachot (“clans/families”) as well as by the repeated mention that these various subgroups of Noah’s offspring were divided according to language”. The story of the Tower of Babel, which sits between the table of the nations and the calling of Abraham, further underlines the element of ethnolinguistic differentiation.

It’s the period of Advent, when we traditionally reflect on the “coming” of Jesus into the world, so let’s consider the question of why he came when he did. Why was Jesus born in 4 BC or thereabouts, and not two hundred years earlier, or a thousand years later?

I’m still making my way through Matthew Bates’ stimulating and frustrating book Gospel Allegiance: What Faith in Jesus Misses for Salvation in Christ, and the question of “timing” has come up—how fortuitous!—in the context of his discussion the relation of gospel allegiance to grace.

I make this point frequently: the theological content of the New Testament is not structured systematically and universally. It is structured narratively and historically. So, for example, we are not presented with a general doctrine of atonement that applies under all circumstances. What we see, I think, is Jesus’ death interpreted as part of an unfolding narrative that is only diminished by translation into the generalised abstractions of a systematic soteriology. If the narrative was good enough for the New Testament churches, it should be good enough for us.

I am delighted—and a little nervous—to announce that my new book End of Story? Same-Sex Relationships and the Narratives of Evangelical Mission has just been published by Wipf & Stock. The book explores how scripture frames the ancient phenomenon of same-sex sexual relations narratively—in effect, eschatologically—and asks whether the narrative, from the perspective of the missional church in the secular West, has moved on to the point that the phenomenon needs to be reframed.

Ryan sent me a nice email a few days ago. He tells me that he has a very conservative theology but struggles with the traditional understanding of hell. He has read some of the articles on this site about hell and finds them “extremely fascinating”, but he has some questions. For example, why should a person who says “fool” to someone be in danger of the fire of hell? “Can you explain this through your viewpoint?” he asks. “Why would someone be thrown into the valley for calling someone a fool? And what is the fire about if it’s just a valley?” So what can we say about this curious passage from the sermon on the mount?