Marginal Christianity

December 18, 2013 by Adam Nigh In the video below, N. T. Wright discusses his new book on Paul’s theology. He strongly asserts that the ministry and death of Jesus Christ have to be understood within the history of Israel and the promises God made to Abraham, Christ himself being the fulfillment of those promises, the righteous Israel that restores humanity and thereby creation in light of the primeval fall. That much I think ought to be noncontroversial. Have a look. What is wonky about this is the unapologetic plan-B-ness of Wright’s understanding of Abraham, the nation of Israel that comes from him and therefore Jesus as the fulfillment of God’s intentions with that nation. Read more at https://theologyoutofbounds.wordpress.com/2013/12/18/2176/

Prelude: What’s Going on in the Old Testament Anyway? The Place of the Old Testament           As we embark on God’s response to humanity’s revolt against him we face the fact of the Old Testament. This sprawling, daunting, mystifying, complex story occupies the vast majority of the Christian Bible. That alone makes us ask “What’s going on in the Old Testament anyway?” And “What use is it to the church today?”           The church adopted the scriptures of the Hebrew Bible as their own and joined them to those documents that eventually became the New Testament to form it Bible. So what is the relation they discerned between these two sets of texts that made it possible and plausible to read them together? The church understood its existence as a part of the long story of what God had been doing in and for the world from creation onwards . However complicated and difficult it may be ...

  February 9, 2015 by Peter Enns 0 Comments Is there resurrection from the dead in the Old Testament? No. Not really. Well, sort of. O.K., yes, but it depends on how you look at it. Resurrection is pretty central to the New Testament, in case you haven’t noticed. Yet searching for that kind of resurrection it in the Old Testament makes you come up basically empty-handed. We do have one lengthy passage, Daniel 12, which is an important text for understanding the development of Jewish faith later in the Second Temple period (in the second century BCE) when “resurrection” of individuals was in the air generally within Judaism (more below). 2 Maccabees is another example of a text from roughly the same period and which mentions the future resurrection of the dead as if no one needs it explained to them (e.g., see 2 Maccabees 7:9) Neither Isaiah 25:7 (the Lord will “swallow up death forever”) or 26:19 (“Your dead shall live, their corpses shall rise”) se...

  Written by Stephen Taylor Monday, 17 November 2014 00:00 Events in Israel-Palestine have recently been overshadowed by the horrors in Syria and Iraq, but the tragedy of the Holy Land continues unabated. Even today (at the writing, Oct. 28, 2014) The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a brief article on the pledge of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, to continue building in East Jerusalem (p. A5). “[T]hese places will stay in Israeli sovereignty under any agreement,” he is quoted as saying. Sadly, a majority of American evangelicals continues to regard Netanyahu’s stance as fully justified. With some notable exceptions, evangelical leaders and pundits are reluctant to focus on the suffering of Palestinian Arabs, many of them Christians, in this long ordeal. For some this reluctance is based on a complex set of considerations, but for nearly all – including the minority just mentioned – the prophetic promises to Israel enumerated in the Old Testament play a major rol...

http://growrag.wordpress.com/2014/03/10/israel-is-not-a-sick-man-who-was-allowed-to-recover-but-one-risen-from-the-dead-jesus-as-israel/ March 10, 2014 · by Bobby Grow · in Amillennialism , Biblical Theology , Federal Theology , Karl Barth · 4 Comments                Much like you will find in the work of Thomas F. Torrance in his recently published New College , Edinburgh lectures ( Incarnation & Atonement, edited by his nephew, Robert T. Walker ), Karl Barth in his coverage on The Apostles’ Creed in his small and accessible book Dogmatics In Outline highlights the dialectical relationship that the covenant nation of Israel has with Jesus Christ . What is very rich about Barth’s coverage is that he makes something quite explicit, and it is something that some Covenant theologians get wrong; and it is something that most Dispensational exegetes caricature. That is, that...