In the first century Jewish believers were awaiting the day when the Messiah would come and defeat Rome, end the exile, establish the kingdom of God, and bring the new covenant. Jesus fulfilled all of those roles of Messiah, but not in the manner in which it was expected.
This week I am putting the final touches on the first draft of my PhD thesis on suffering and eschatology in Galatians. I’m quite excited to be at this stage, but I know there’s still a lot of work to be done. Since my thesis is on Galatians I’m often thinking about the best way to translate it. I love reading new translations and thinking through their interpretive decisions. For this week I thought I’d...
Do you ever wonder what relationships are going to be like in heaven? Will we recognize our family, friends, and significant others? How will we relate to one another, since we’ll all be part of the same family, as brothers and sisters? My coworkers and I recently speculated about heaven, and we mused about how they would relate to their husbands. Would all romantic attraction be gone, since marriage doesn’t exist between people in heaven?...
Now that school is out for summer (cue Alice Cooper) I’m back home working for my church as a youth ministry intern. As we began to plan for the summer and what we should teach on I recommended books like Colossians and Philippians. You know, something short and sweet that would be really encouraging. So when my youth pastor called me and told me we were going to be teaching through James this summer, I...
As one who works with youth, I often feel the pressure or need to spice up the Christian story and make it more engaging, relevant, or fun. In much of the literature that is deemed “Youth Ministry” or in some of the examples set forth as “successful youth ministries,” what works is when the Christian message is accompanied with a some flash, a little razzle dazzle, and just the right amount of pizzazz! The youth...
For the majority of my American Evangelical upbringing , I feel as though I was told that there were two main criteria for what religious leaders around me called “being a believer”: 1) one must have the right beliefs (orthodoxy) and 2) one must live an upstanding moral life (orthopraxy). This understanding of Christianity that frames it as a system of right beliefs is, no doubt, a kind of ideological holdover from the era in...
Nearly two years ago I wrote a blog post entitled, Church Security Teams? Verdict: Unbiblical, that seemed to be quite popular. Although, if I had my druthers it would have been popular because people agreed with it. But seeing as the article garnered a paltry two Facebook likes and the comments were rife with disagreement, it seemed to be popular (or should I say unpopular?) for my brazenly stupid idea of suggesting that church security...
Nearly two years ago I wrote a post entitled, “Amillennialism: Rethinking and Critiquing my Eschatology After Five Years.” In that post I analyzed an earlier blog post I wrote back in 2007 called, “How I Became An Amillennialist.” Two years ago I concluded that I was still an Amillennialist, but I realized that many of the arguments I previously found so convincing were not nearly as persuasive. Now I’m ready to say it: I’m a...
Cigarette smoke drifts over the surface of the desk—the picture of [Pilate’s] wife when she still had her looks, the onyx box from Caesar, the clay plaque with the imprint of his first son’s hand on it, made while he was still a child in nursery school. Pilate squints at the man through the smoke and asks his question. He asks it half because he would give as much as even his life to hear...
I am sure that to many, the title of this article made you roll your eyes a little bit. You know that the Bible talks about churches meeting in houses but… I mean, that can’t possibly apply to our cultural setting today. You also may have met some rather bizarre individuals who were house church advocates. Or perhaps, you don’t see how a house church could maintain good doctrine. My goal in this short piece...
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