Marginal Christianity

http://timgombis.com/2013/01/07/what-sort-of-text-is-romans/ By timgombis   I’m beginning a two-week intensive course on Romans today and thought I’d re-post this rumination on reading Paul’s text for what it is rather than for what many expect it to be. What sort of communication from Paul is Romans?  It’s been quite common to assume that Romans is a systematic treatise on the Christian faith.  Many commentaries contain an outline of Romans structured according to systematic theological categories.  Paul deals with the  doctrine  of justification here, the  doctrine  of sanctification there, the  doctrine  of election over there. If Paul had any  practical  purpose, it’s that he is informing his readers of his theology in an attempt to establish his orthodox credentials.  He wants to secure Rome as a mission base for his eventual goal of reaching Spain with the gospel (Rom. 15:24). Such a perspecti...

ttp://timgombis.com/2012/09/10/politics-the-god-of-israel/ By timgombis In his book The God of Israel and Christian Theology , Kendall Soulen argues that God’s ways with Israel must shape how we think theologically. God called Israel to be a distinct people with an alternative national way of life, and they were to be the agents of God’s blessing for all the nations of the earth. God’s intentions for Israel in the Scriptures must be the starting point in considering Paul’s political vision. Because Western Christianity has neglected Israel in doing theology, it has forgotten that being the people of God is a fundamentally political reality. Throughout the Scriptures, the God of Israel is intensely concerned with the mundane affairs of humankind—love and loss, child-bearing, child-rearing, barrenness, war and peace, crop rotations, care for the earth, friendship, commerce, economics, politics, sex and gender, oppression, exploitation, slavery, to name just a few. According to ...

Faith Improvised August 23, 2012 By timgombis Rep. Todd Akin’s comments about rape last week ignited a firestorm. His ignorance of female anatomy and human reproduction, and his insensitivity to rape victims caused great offense. There is much I’d like to say about many aspects of this discussion, but I’ll make just this one point: If I were a policy-maker in power who claimed to be Christian, I would tread very carefully on issues like this so as to avoid God’s judgment. I say this because those who are violated and treated with extreme injustice have a place near and dear to the heart of the one true God. Christians confess that in Jesus God himself became a victim of abuse and injustice, his body being violated. The New Testament is explicit that in being so treated, Jesus was the ultimate and clearest possible revelation of the God of all creation (Mark 15:39; John 17; Phil. 2:5-11). If, then, God intentionally became a victim and one of the violated, and Scripture...

As a follow up to my suggestions about Jesus’ “End of the World” discourse in Matthew 24, I offer today a reflection by New Testament Professor Tim Gombis on Mark’s version of this teaching by Jesus.   Enjoy! Living Between the End and the End: A Homily By timgombis (http://timgombis.com/) *Originally given at Midtown Christian Community, October 9, 2010. I’ve always been deathly afraid of passages like Mark 13.  I grew up in an evangelical culture that would read passages like Mark 13 as wild and woolly predictions of end-times cataclysms, assigning biblical significance to contemporary events.  Back in the 1980’s, the big fear was the Soviet Union and of course we all knew that America enjoyed Most Favored Nation status with God, so in some way biblical prophecies of gloom and doom were involved in current international relations.  “This passage right here in Revelation has to do with the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; and this one in Matthew probably re...