In good off-the-cuff biblical language Donald Trump has warned that North Korea’s recent salvo of threats “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen”.

Jesus said that the Roman assault on Jerusalem would result in “such tribulation as has not been from the beginning of the creation that God created until now, and never will be” (Mk. 13:19). Josephus shared his view: “Accordingly it appears to me, that the misfortunes of all men, from the beginning of the world, if they be compared to these of the Jews, are not so considerable as they were” (War 1.12). Both of them, I imagine, were recalling Daniel 12:1: “there shall be a time of trouble, such as never has been since there was a nation till that time”.

What did the centurion at the cross believe about Jesus? Did he believe that Jesus was the true Son of God? Did he believe that he was equivalent to the divinised emperor? Or did he merely agree with popular Jewish opinion that Jesus was a righteous man (and not the first), who had been unjustly put to death by the corrupt régime? In other words, why was last week’s post about “a son of God” and not about “the Son of God”?

The problem for interpretation, in the first place, is that in this type of sentence it can be difficult to know whether the Greek phrase huios theou (“son of God”) is definite or indefinite—“the Son of God” or “a son of God”.

When the centurion, who stood opposite him, saw that he expired in this way, he said, “Truly, this man was a son / the Son of God (huios theou ēn).” (Mk. 15:39)

This is a quick response to Mark Nieweg’s question, following yesterday’s post on Jesus as the Son of God, whether Hebrews 7:13 is an argument for the eternal existence of the Son of God: “He is without father or mother or genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but resembling the Son of God he continues a priest forever” (ESV).

It is, and it isn’t.

I may get into trouble for this, but I want to make a couple of constructive critical points about this quotation from the missiologist Alan Hirsch, posted by communitaseuropa on Instagram.

My friend Joel White—well, technically I suppose he’s the brother of my friend Wes, but the brother of my friend is my friend—kindly sent me a copy of an article he wrote on Colossians 1:24 because we had a chat about this once. It’s a pet theme of mine. The article is entitled “Paul Completes the Servant’s Sufferings (Colossians 1:24)” and was published last year in the Journal for the Study of Paul and His Letters (6.2). This post is really just a personal rejoinder to Joel.

The article offers a solution to this puzzling verse, and not one that I had come across before.

Now I rejoice in the sufferings for your sake, and I complete (antanaplērō) what is lacking of the afflictions of the Christ in my flesh for the sake of his body, which is the church.

The theological problem is immediately apparent. How could Paul think that there was a deficiency in Christ’s sufferings? How could he be so presumptuous as to imagine that he could remedy the matter?

What is Christian political witness? In an age of both political upheaval and the headlong marginalisation of the church it’s a good question to ask. In a cogently written piece on Political Theology Today Alastair Roberts argues that:

Christian political witness must be built around and declare Christ as the great eschatological stone laid by God. He must either be approached as the stubborn obstacle, arresting the development of all idolatrous political visions, or as the chief cornerstone, the sure and solid basis from [which] all else can take its bearings.

He arrives at this conclusion by way of a reading of 1 Peter 2:4-10. The passage is a call to those who are “elect exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia” (1 Pet. 1:1) to become part of a living, eschatological temple, built on the stone that was rejected by the builders but which God used as “the very head of the corner”.