Marginal Christianity

The first chapter, “Paul and the Mission of God,” considers what Paul thinks God is up to in the world (the missio Dei): in a word, salvation. It then relates God’s salvation to participation in Christ before addressing the challenging question of if, and how, Paul expected his communities and individual believers (rather than just apostles and “missionaries”) to participate in the mission of God. This chapter provides the basic Pauline framework for the rest of the book. The chapter argues that, for Paul, to participate in Christ is both to benefit from God’s mission of liberation and reconciliation and to bear witness to this divine mission — thus furthering it — by becoming a faithful embodiment of it. Both communities and individuals bear public witness to the gospel and thus participate in the missio Dei. The second chapter, “Reading Paul Missionally,” sets the interpretive framework for the rest of the book. It first explores the idea of missional hermeneutics, or biblical...

In the welter of talk and writing about “atonement” during the last fifteen years or so, a few things have become clearer while others have taken on a murkier hue. It is clearer to most now that the variety of biblical images for atonement must be respected and brought into conversation with one another. No longer can or should one image for atonement rule over, overrule, or rule out the others. One writer has suggested the image of “kaleidoscopic” as the best one we have to work with now. It is clearer to most now that unless a penal or substitutionary view is rooted in the eternal love of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit and the triune God’s electing from all eternity to be for us, such views are morally and theologically unacceptable. Even so, a good number of recent writers remain unwilling to have a penal or substitutionary odor of any kind in their theories of atonement (most recently, Tony Jones). What has become murkier is whether there is or should be an imag...