Marginal Christianity

New Creation (21:1-22:5) Gen.1-2 and Rev.21-22 This last scene of the vision of Revelation, the conclusion to Jesus’ sermon, takes us beyond the realm of sin and struggle to the fulfilment of God’s eternal purpose. Here we find the counterpart to Gen.1-2 as bookends of the entire biblical story which reveal the “point” of purpose of the whole story. The creation stories reveal the Creator’s work in constructing a temple for he and his creatures to live together in intimacy and harmony. [1] That is his purpose and that for which God works throughout the biblical story. When this purpose is derailed by our sin, resolving that becomes the major focus of the story from Gen.3 – Rev.20. But that story serves to demonstrate not only the reclamation of God’s wayward creatures but most importantly their restoration to God’s original design. That’s what we find in Gen.1-2 and Rev.21-22, the only four chapters in the Bible in which sin plays no role. Here we find God’s purpose ...

Ch.12: You’d Like (Hate) Living in the End Times           If you think you’d like to live in the end times, or if that scares the hell out of you, I’ve got really great or really bad news for you! YOU DO! That’s right, you and I live in what the Bible calls the end times. That’s the whole period from Jesus’ resurrection to his return. It is his resurrection that demonstrates this. For Jews, who expected a general resurrection of the dead on the day when God intervenes to set all things right, the inescapable meaning of the resurrection of a Jew in the middle of time was that the Day of the Lord had arrived and the end times were upon them. This is certainly how the Jews who wrote the New Testament documents took it. -in both the gospel and letters of John “eternal life” (the life of the age to come) is a reality Christians can experience in the here and now as well as the then and there. -Paul describes the Corinthians as tho...

Biblical Studies , Theology J. Richard Middleton The most well-known, and perhaps well-loved, verse in the Bible is John 3:16. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (NRSV). God so loved the world — the kosmos , in Greek. Could that mean what we mean today by the “cosmos”? God loves … this universe? We know that elsewhere in the Gospel of John, and also in 1 John, the term kosmos refers to the social order, indeed, the corrupt, fallen “world” that humans have constructed. So 1 John 2:15 tells us: “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in them.” This verse understands human beings as loving, desiring creatures; what we set our hearts on shapes our lives. So we’re warned against internalizing the values of this corrupt world, this twisted social order. Love of the world in this sense is antithet...

We live between the good news of the past (Jesus’ death and resurrection) and the good news of the future (Jesus’ return and new creation). And that has tremendous implications for the value and urgency of embracing this good news for the present.   This is paradigm Wright has set up for us in the first two chapters (Part 1 of this review).   Chs.3 and 4 (Part 2) explored the good news of the past – Jesus, the good news of his life, death, and resurrection and influences that have distorted that good news through the centuries. His next two chapters take up the good news of the future and various distortions that have bedeviled it. We live between history and hope. These give our present meaning.   Or they should. However, the default gospel Wright outlines in the first two chapters often leave the present vacant and of seemingly little value by its twin convictions that the purpose of Jesus’ saving us and our ultimate destination is heaven where we will dwell w...