Over at The Jesus Blog, Rafael Rodriguez has finished up  his 8 part review of Bart Ehrman’s Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior. Probably Rodriguez’s main critique of Ehrman is that he does not really understand memory studies and their application to early Christianity. Although Ehrman  points out some interesting things about the nature of memory, and poses some carefully crafted rhetorical questions, he does not really present an accurate description... Read more

In my book, The Saving Righteousness of God, I tried to articulate a middle view between old and new perspectives on Paul. Is the unity of Jews and Gentiles in the body of Christ illustrative of the effects of justification or is it constitutive in that God’s saving righteous creates a new people, with a new status, in a new covenant, as a foretaste of the new age? I am persuaded that we must pursue the latter. Justification by faith means... Read more

Matthew Crawford is a graduate of SBTS, he did a doctorate and post-doctoral fellowship at Durham University, and is currently research fellow at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne. He is the author of Cyril of Alexandria’s Trinitarian Theology of Scripture (Oxford: OUP, 2014). In the miniature essay below, he shows what Cyril contributes to the debate about relations and authority in the Trinity. If anything, just read the conclusion! Clarifying Nicene Trinitarianism: The Difference between Relations of Origin and Relations of Authority... Read more

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I’ve just finished a very slow read through James Dunn’s mammoth Neither Jew nor Greek, and he asks a fascinating question early on: I want to ask the unrealistic, but nevertheless fascinating question: would Peter, James and Paul have been as satisfied with what happened in the second century, and thereafter, as Eusebius was? Would they have affirmed that the emergence of the great church, the antithesis with Judaism, the disowning of Jewish-Christianity and the denunciation of the Gnostic variations, was... Read more

I just read two great articles that I thoroughly recommend to you: In Comment Magazine, James K. A. Smith writes on “Rethinking the Secular, Redeeming Christendom.” Christendom, then, is a missional endeavor that refuses to let political society remain protected from the lordship of Christ while it also recognizes the eschatological distance between the now and the not-yet. From the center of the church as a political society, Christendom bears witness to how society should be otherwise in a way that... Read more

Just when you thought the melee was over, some interesting posts on the Complementarian Trinity Debate have gone up! Over at TGC-A, Andrew Moody has part 2 of “The Ordered Godhead.” He confesses that he is driven by an “aesthetic agenda” rather than by a gender agenda where “The idea that creation arises out of the Father’s initiating desire to honour his Son; and that it is completed by the Son’s response seems beautiful to me.” He rightly observes that the point... Read more

Anthony Thiselton Systematic Theology Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015. Available at Amazon.com Reviewed by Adam Ch’ng Most systematic theologies are structured around a key organising principle, whether explicitly adopted or implicitly assumed.  For John Frame, it is the lordship of Christ.  For Millard Erickson, it is the magnificence of God.  And for Michael Bird, it is the evangel, the good news itself. However, in his Systematic Theology, Anthony Thiselton charts a slightly different course.  Instead of constructing a theological core... Read more

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I am the subject of an article in Challenge, a Christian newspaper, where Darryl Budge describes some snippets from my life story of how I came to faith. Doubt gave way to faith in Jesus Christ as Lord of the Universe, which Michael says “opened a constellation of meaning, beauty, hope, and life that I had been indoctrinated to deny”. Read more