Theology blogging is a bit slow at the moment because I'm writing another article on the atonement which is taking a while but it should be done by the end of the week hopefully. I also still need to finish a post on Jesus and Guantanamo Bay which I intended to post two months ago, but it'll all be done in time.

In the meantime, check out the website of Manchester's premier emergent church Sanctus, which also has a blog here. The 71st Christian Carnival is up at Technogypsy. I haven't been through all the posts but so far John's entry on the trinity looks good, as does Richard's (not Destruction of Gog Richard) post on Luke and the poor. CWV Warrior carries on a discussion on Genesis and Evolution in response to a discussion we both started a few weeks ago. My own entry was (rather lazily) a submission of an essay I wrote on Genesis 3:16.

The other Richard is also opening up a free for all discussion on the Wrath of God which will be worth checking out.

This was a frustrating essay to do. I was forced to stick rigidly to the 3,500 word limit so couldn't fit everything in, but it covers most of the major issues in Paul's thought about the resurrection body. I've since found it amazing just how many Christians  a) have never given any thought to the implications of Christ's resurrection for the church when it is probably the main focus in Paul's theology and b) sincerely believe that God's eternal plan is for our 'souls' to go to heaven and that's it. Scary, yet popular. Anyhow here's the essay:

Discuss Paul’s theology of the resurrection body in 1 Corinthians 15

1 Corinthians 15 contains the most well developed resurrection theology to be found in any of Paul’s letters, or even in the entire New Testament. However, much more will be gleaned from the text if we remember that 1 Corinthians 15 is not an abstract treatise on resurrection for its own sake, but forms the final part of his correspondence with the Corinthian church, and it should be understood in the light of the wider problems in Corinth that Paul is addressing.

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I think this is one of the first essays I ever wrote in Theology. It's not very good but gives a broad outline of how the charismatic movement began in the UK.

At the turn of the 21^st Century, it was estimated that there were around 550 million people in the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement worldwide<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]-->, a far cry from numbers in the movement at the turn of the last century, which were as low as 40<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[2]<!--[endif]-->. Such growth rates are phenomenal, and make Charismaticism one of the largest religious bodies within Christianity, if not all the major world religions.

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By way of building up the archives, I've posted some of my old essays from a couple of years ago. Some are good, some are ok, and some just make me want to cringe like when you look at old embarassing photos of youself. All of them certainly use some improvement.

First up is an overview of Jürgen Moltmann's Christology.

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Here's currently what's what in some of the Christian blogs I regularly read:

Richard has an excellent post that outlines the Christian doctrine of forgiveness in the atonement here. Christ is not killed to meet the requirements of divine compensation, but Christ deliberately and wilfully bears all the sin of the world so that there is no longer any obstacle between God and man because in his love for the world God chooses to bear the cost and weight of our sin himself, as one of us.

Rebecca over at Everyday Musings has a post that analyses some of the tensions and paradoxes in Calvinist theology, such as the relationship between God's sovereignty and human responsibility and is an excellent read as always. I'm reading up as best I can on Calvinism and this post is interesting although for me the jury is still out, and (although this is not what Rebecca's post is about) I think the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination and limited atonement are not as biblically and theologically sound as I think they are made out to be. I've recently written two posts on the matter here and here. Read more...

Gregory of Nyssa (335-390)

I've only recently come across Gregory of Nyssa, and he's of interest to me for my thesis because his eschatology firmly embraces the issue of the new creation of all things, not just heaven, hell, and final judgement as we've become accustomed to in modern western eschatology. Essentially he argues that sin and death did not exist in the beginning, and that neither will they endure eternally. God will not finally give anyone up for lost because it would mean that he would become unfaithful to what he had created.

I especially like this quote, as it spoke to my current frustrating situation with pasts of Christian theology who thinks that to know God means to own him and to be able to explain him in static and rigid systematic concepts. Such an approach leads to idolatry, not a knowledge of Christ:

"Concepts create idols, only wonder comprehends anything. People kill one another over idols. Wonder makes us fall to our knees." Read more...