Its Pentecost Sunday, the one day of the year where we are all Pentecostal … to some extent or other. Any way, here’s a great quote from N.T. Wright’s Pentecost sermon from 2009: The claim of Pentecost, from Acts 2 and Ephesians 4 and Romans 8 and all those other great Spirit-texts in the New Testament, especially John 13—16, is precisely that the rule which the ascended Lord Jesus exercises on earth is exercised through his Spirit-filled people. No doubt we... Read more

Over at RNS, Jonathan Merritt interviews N.T. Wright about the Bible and Inerrancy. He answers one question saying: I don’t think I’ve ever said “I am not an inerrantist.” But the controversies which gave rise to that label were strongly conditioned by a shrunken post-enlightenment rationalism, and I would hate to perpetuate that. It’s possible that “inerrancy” is, so to speak, the right answer to the wrong question. It’s a bit like “transubstantiation” in the Middle Ages: if someone asks, “Is... Read more

More reviews of Bart Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God are doing the rounds: Larry Hurtado reviews Ehrman here and then gives an amendment here. Ken Schenck looks at Ehrman and Jesus’ self-understanding here. James McGrath has comments on both. Read more

Thesis 5: You’ll Never Understand Rom 7:7-25 Unless You’ve Seen Les Miserables There’s an amazing line in Les Miserables where Jean Valjean says, “I remember those nineteen years, a slave of the law.” Perhaps Rom 7:7-25 is meant as a speech-in-character, where the character now realizes with the hindsight of faith the futility of their life under the law, leading only to slavery in sin, which in turns gives way to an anthem of thanksgiving and praise to Jesus Christ as... Read more

I’d like to invite you to partner with me as I serve this July in the Czech Republic. For our longterm blog readers you may remember that I have come to love deeply our brothers and sisters in Christ in the Czech. Over the course of the last three years, I have had the privilege serving alongside partner churches in Prague and southern Bohemia discipling believers and sharing the gospel with spiritual seekers as I’ve made 4 separate trips. I’ve... Read more

I’m currently re-reading sections of Michael Horton’s helpful volume The Christian Faith and thought his remarks about the eschatological tension in sanctification – esp. in light of certain TGC controversies – was quite apt: If taken to an extreme, the “not yet” emphasis can lead to a kind of quietism in which this world remains untouched in its depth by the forensic Word and its transforming effects, while an overemphasis on the “already” and “more adn more” of sanctification can yield... Read more

Mark Driscoll gave a sermon on Acts 6 where he suggested that, as a child, it is possible that Jesus made mistakes. Mars Hill deleted some of the scenes in Driscoll’s sermon on that point, but you can see the video here, and a it has caused a little stir. Well the good folks at CT have put up the topic for discussion, Did Jesus Make Mistakes? Maybe I’m getting liberal in my old age, but I’ve come to the... Read more

Over at HuffPo Religion is a good piece by Jon M. Sweeney on “Hell Is a Myth – Actually, a Bunch of Myths.” Sweeney shows that much of what people believe about hell is attributable to Dante rather than to the Bible. So why do we continue to have such a fascination with the hell of Dante’s imagination? It is certainly due to how Christians have embraced and preached it for centuries. The sad truth is that Dante’s hellish vision... Read more

It was an awkward an email to get: my primary supervisor was leaving the school where I had only recently registered as a young doctoral student in New Testament. There are several possible steps; muddle through with a departed supervisor; change schools; or stay at the school and try a new supervisor. The college authorities reported that they were acquiring a new Australian who “looks quite promising.” So with legendary Prof I Howard Marshall remaining on as my second supervisor,... Read more

Thesis 4: Rom 7:7-25 is an “Open” Text I want to suggest here that a little dose of reader-response criticism might actually be helpful for understanding this passage. Since Paul does not explicitly nominate the identity of the speaker in the speech, the identity of the “I” remains quite “open,” perhaps deliberately. The open-endedness of the speaker’s identity explains precisely why so many divergent interpretations have arisen over the centuries. Let us remember that if postmodern literary theorists have taught... Read more