God wants to bless you! Or does he?
I like the church that we go to. I like its exuberance and energy and robust conviction that God is a living, dynamic, transformative, communicating, healing presence in the midst of the community. But...
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Becoming like Jesus—not all that it’s made out to be
I wrote a couple of weeks back about the close and defining connection in Paul’s thought between sonship and the specific theme of suffering and vindication. Paul appears to make a crucial distinction...
View ArticleRob Bell and the Apostle Paul on the moral, intellectual and spiritual...
Now that much of the fuss over Rob Bell’s book has died down, and the spotlight of pre-emptive inquisition has shifted to Francis Chan’s as yet unpublished Erasing Hell: What God Said About Eternity,...
View ArticleOccupy London: what would Jesus have done?
The confrontation between the Occupy LSX encampment and the St Paul’s authorities in London over the last couple of weeks has reminded many commentators of Jesus’ shocking display of anti-establishment...
View ArticleThe narrative-historical reading of the New Testament: what's in it for me?...
In this short series of posts I have been trying to show why and how a narrative-historical reading of the New Testament—that is, a reading that adjusts the theological content of the New Testament to...
View ArticleAt the risk of repeating myself...
I have been goaded, against my better judgment, into responding to Peter Wilkinson’s persistent complaint that I have not answered the five points that he raised against the narrative-historical...
View ArticleShould we still love our enemies?
Chris asks a straightforward and pertinent question in response to my general argument that a narrative-historical hermeneutic, which necessarily brings into the foreground of our reading the...
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Some notes on discipleship
I have the opportunity to do some teaching on discipleship later in the week at a Christian Associates staff conference in Scotland. This rather lengthy piece is part of my preparation. I have tried to...
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What do we mean when we say that Jesus is Lord?
The “gospel” today comes in two main user-friendly varieties. There is a “hard” version, which says that we are sinners subject to wrath, but Jesus died for our sins so that we may have eternal life...
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Discipleship means giving up everything to follow Jesus. Or does it?
Lloyd Pietersen’s post-Christendom reading of the Gospels leads him to stress the fact that for Luke “discipleship means giving up everything to follow Jesus” (Reading the Bible After Christendom,...
View ArticleThe Great (Apocalyptic) Commission
I recently received an email from someone who has a friend who had a couple of points to make about the so-called Great Commission. She wants to know what I think.Since Jesus tells his followers to...
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A half-truth of modern evangelicalism: Jesus lives in the heart of the believer
The controlling New Testament story about the resurrected Jesus is that he is seated at the right hand of the Father, having received authority to judge and rule over the nations. The thought runs from...
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Why did Jesus instruct his disciples not to preach the kingdom of God to...
Gospel and salvationKingdom of GodPraxis and discipleshipThis issue came up in some teaching I did recently. Why did Jesus instruct his disciples not to go in the way of the Gentiles or to the towns of...
View ArticleDo the disciples pray to the Lord Jesus in Acts?
In a comment on an old post looking at a review by Larry Hurtado of Dunn’s Did the First Christians Worship Jesus, Marc Taylor maintains that “Dunn’s assertion that certain prayer words are not used in...
View ArticleBlessed are the narrative-historical interpreters: preaching the Beatitudes
We had a very good sermon on the Beatitudes yesterday. It did not sentimentalise the passage. It paid attention to the literary form. It was sensitive to language. It warned against careless...
View ArticleWhat must the church become? Narrative and praxis
An opinion piece in the Guardian last week asked, “Is the end of western Christianity in sight?” On the strength of the most recent British Social Attitudes data the article asserted that “No religion”...
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Is suffering part of God’s plan for us?
A couple of recent tweets from The Gospel Coalition raise the question of the place of suffering both in the New Testament narrative and in Christian experience. The first is an unattributed quotation,...
View ArticleDiscipleship and the eschatological narrative of 1 Corinthians
I have to prepare some material about discipleship for a small leaders’ retreat. The approach I want to take is to frame discipleship narrative-historically. No surprises there. One way to do this is...
View ArticleWhy talking to the exalted Jesus was not prayer
After the death of Judas the disciples decide that a replacement must be chosen to bear witness to Jesus’ resurrection. Two men are nominated, Barsabbas and Matthias. Luke then writes:And they prayed...
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Who is being transformed into the image of Christ? Not me
I’ve just got back from a missions conference at which the idea that believers in general and “missionaries” in particular are being—or should be—transformed into the “image of Christ” got a lot of...
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