In a chapter on “Christian Empire, Christian Mission” in Defending Constantine Peter Leithart challenges the view of John Howard Yoder—widely accepted amongst modern theologians if not amongst historians—that Constantinianism was a fundamental departure from the intention of Jesus and the… ( | 1 comment)
I am increasingly coming to the view that a narrative-historical reading of the New Testament will sooner or later be seen to have significant implications for how we understand the transition that the church made in the fourth century from persecuted minority to privileged imperial religion. For… ( | 8 comments)
Douglas Campbell’s The Deliverance of God is a highly polemical argument about the nature of salvation and the character of God. It is polemical inasmuch as it is driven from the outset by a rigorous opposition to what Campbell calls “Justification theory”—the argument that salvation… ( | 13 comments)
Jim Hoag has a couple of pertinent questions about my “Postconservative evangelicalism and beyond” post—pertinent, in fact, to the point that he makes me wonder whether the piece had much in the way of substance to it at all. The first question has to do with what we understand by the “New… ( | 4 comments)
A few pages from the end of The Deliverance of God Douglas Campbell appends a rather limp section—less than a page—on the “wrath of God” (929-30). The discussion, admittedly, concludes a chapter examining only Philippians and a smattering of “ancillary’ texts in the light of his re-reading… ( | 3 comments)
Having worked through the first part of Douglas Campbell’s The Deliverance of God I think at least one broad provisional judgment can be made with regard to his general approach. What Campbell has done so far is set out in a very thorough and rigorous fashion what he understands by… ()
Scot McKnight has been looking at Peter Leithart’s book Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom. Scot doesn’t sound too impressed at the outset by Leithart’s thesis, and much of the comment has been from scandalized Anabaptists.
Scot… ( | 13 comments)
Douglas Campbell has a curious and ambivalent excursus (89-94) appended to the section in The Deliverance of God in which he claims that Justification theory and the ‘alternative theory’ of salvation drawn from Romans 5-8 differ markedly in the place that they accord ‘coercive and violent… ()
I got my hands on Douglas Campbell’s The Deliverance of God only at a late stage of writing The Future of the People of God and could not make more than limited and very selective use of it. That may have been just as well—in any case, I have now picked it up again with the… ( | 2 comments)
Douglas Campbell’s The Deliverance of God is an extraordinary – and I think extraordinarily flawed – attempt to erase Justification Theory from Paul’s theology. It is a mammoth book to read, let alone attempt to review, in toto; and if it is a large enough wood to survey, it… ()
Everything Must Change (see the synopsis in the first part of this review) will be read by many as a challenge to the modern church to exchange an ineffectual and theologically suspect notion of what it means to be Christian for an ‘emerging’ understanding that offers a credible hope of… ()
It’s three months now since Brian McLaren’s latest book Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope was released, and in the frenzied, web-driven world of emerging theology, three months is a long time. For all I know it’s not even his latest book any more… ()
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