Month: October 2010
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Word and Action
On the Sola Panel: How do you react when you notice that you or your church has a dull, dry, inactive faith, even though you are committed to God’s word? Elvis, in his song, A Little Less Conversation, gives us a model for one way that we could try to solve the problem: A little…
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Are the Gentiles included in Israel?
Μὴ γένοιτο! No way! Gentiles don’t need to be included in Israel. In fact, the opposite is true; we Gentiles are saved by faith in Christ without being included in Israel. That’s one of the apostle Paul’s big points in Romans and Galatians. We are, of course, included in the promises given to Abraham (Rom…
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Suffering and decision-making
On the Sola Panel: Is it better to choose a more difficult ministry, or an easy one? Is it more godly to choose suffering over comfort when we make decisions about life and ministry? After all, suffering makes us more like Jesus, and surely that’s good for us, isn’t it? From time to time, we…
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The quality of “Righteousness” is not strained
John Smuts is asking me some good hard questions about my view of “righteousness” as a quality (rather than a substance or a status). I’m finding the interaction very helpful.
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Jesus at work: trading places
From the Sola Panel Here’s something really interesting in Mark’s Gospel that my lovely wife Bronwyn noticed when she was reading the Bible the other day. Close to the beginning of Mark, in chapter 1, Jesus meets a man with a skin disease: And a leper came to him, imploring him, and kneeling said to…
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Before you criticise any past writer, remember…
The biggest difference between today’s writing and the writing of the past is that writers are no longer put to death. Writers nowadays could never dream of having to die for what they have written. Even if writerly execution was not always common, the possibility of death was implicit in every act of writing. The…
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Rereading Doug Campbell to help us preach the gospel
In chapter 1 of his megabook, The Deliverance of God: an Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), Douglas Campbell outlines what he calls “the justification theory of salvation”, which he seems to regard as a summary of the conventional understanding of the gospel amongst the majority of Western Christians (7). If…
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Golden Rules for Learning Greek
I’m about to start teaching New Testament Greek for beginners for some people at our church. I want to start with some “golden rules”; i.e. principles that the students should keep in mind throughout their Greek learning career. I’d welcome any suggestions for further rules (even if it’s along the lines of “I wish I’d…
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A new beginning for Beginning with Moses
After some years in the wilderness, Beginning with Moses is back in action, with a new generation of contributions and a promising future. The core of the site is its “biblical theology briefings”, which aim to “state as clearly as we can that the Bible has a storyline and that this big picture must by…