Over at ABC’s The Drum, John Dickson (Senior Minister of St. Andrews Anglican Church and Co-Director of CPX) has written a letter to his church about Islam that is worth reading. In the end, I have a simple thing to say, and I feel a strong sense of God’s pleasure in saying it. Common sense and Christian faith urge us to shun both a naïve recasting of Islam as the mirror-image of liberal democracy, and a hateful projection of our own tribalism onto Australian... Read more

Scott Harrower Trinitarian Self and Salvation: An Evangelical Engagement with Rahner’s Rule Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2012. Available at Amazon.com This book by my Ridley colleague Scott Harrower engages Karl Rahner’s famous “rule that “The economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity, and vice versa.”On a strictly realist application of the rule, the economic/functional relations between members of the Godhead in the incarnation and in redemption is a window into the nature of the Godhead and the interpersonal relationships therein from all eternity.... Read more

David deSilva (Ashland Theological Seminary) has a great little book out with Logos in the Snapshots series called, Transformation: The Heart of Paul’s Gospel, where he tries to construct an alternative theology of sanctification over and against the easy believism that is endemic in the evangelical churches. Its only $6.95! DeSilva’s main aim is to use the metaphor of transformation to balance the notion of grace as both gift and obligation. Let me add that this book will be controversial. For those with... Read more

As you might have gathered from my recent posts on Barth’s Romans, I’m reading Barth’s commentary with our 4th year Bible/Theology majors in the capstone seminar for our major. It is my first sequential and complete reading of Barth’s Romans. It is a magesterial work in every sense. I’m finding it to be a difficult, frustrating and deeply profound work, and that usually is my feeling all within one paragraph. Today, I read a beautiful passage on grace: Grace is the... Read more

I was fortunate enough to receive a pre-pub copy of Scot McKnight’s new book Kingdom Conspiracy: Returning to the Radical Mission of the Local Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2014). In a nutshell, McKnight argues that there are two predominant views of “kingdom” operating in and around evangelicalism. First, the skinny jeans view, which equates kingdom with social justice. Second, the pleated pants view, where kingdom equates to God’s redemptive work. McKnight wants to affirm the good of social justice work and the... Read more

Over at Sola Crux, Nijay Gupta gives a brief review of my The Gospel of the Lord. Glad to see that I am a proud recipient of the “Gupta bump,” I think Nijay needs to produce a trophy to be given to recipients. Read more

Reza Aslan’s book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth tried to give the zealot hypothesis a shot in the arm. Even more recently, Dale Martin has written a piece entitled, “Jesus in Jerusalem: Armed and Not Dangerous,” JSNT 37.1 (2014): 3-24. The substance of his argument is that: In debating the meaning of Jesus’ arrest and death at Jerusalem, scholars have paid too little attention to normal Roman practices of dealing with persons found armed in public in Rome or other cities under their... Read more

Look, I like Karl Barth, his christocentric theology, his trinitarian revelationism, and lots of  other stuff. However, I’ve been reading over his Romans commentary and as much as I try to appreciate him as a theological interpreter and all, some of the stuff he says is just whacky. When it comes to the identity of the “weak” in faith in Rom 14:2, Barth says that the modern equivalents are Baptists, teetotalers, open air preachers, and vegetarians. Do you know anyone... Read more

The Leon Morris Centenary continues over at the Ridley Blog with a short post by I. Howard Marshall on In gratitude for Leon Morris. Great piece, do check it out! Quite simply he was one of the few really competent evangelical scholars who was able to take on the opposition and be recognised as a worthy defender by those who did not share his conclusions. I say ‘One of the few’: the result was that when issues cropped up on which no evangelicals were... Read more

I’ve not read a more powerful statement on the “righteousness of God”. The righteousness of God is His forgiveness, the radical alteration of the relation between God and man which explains why, though human unrighteousness and ungodliness have brought the world to its present condition and are intolerable to Him, He nevertheless continues to name us His people in order that we may BE His people. The righteousness of God is righteousness from outside—justitia forensis, justitia aliena; for the Judge... Read more