Michael Bird has announced that his recent journal article entitled “The Purpose and Preservation of the Jesus Tradition: Moderate Evidence for a Conserving Force in its Transmission.” is now available to read online. I heartily recommend anyone interested in the history of the NT and the early church to read it when they get chance to. Here's an outline:

"An important preface to historical Jesus research involves formulating a theory of the transmission of the traditions underlying the Gospels. Scholarship frequently exhibits either an inherent skepticism towards trying to uncover how this tradition was handled or else is saturated with multiple proposals concerning the means of its formation. In any event, important questions to be asked include what purpose the Jesus tradition had in early Christian circles and what factors or controls may have enabled that tradition to be effectively preserved. This study addresses such questions and, with careful qualification, contends that the Jesus tradition probably had a variety of functions in the early church and there were several reasons why the words and deeds of Jesus may have been consciously preserved."

Here's the full article.

Chris of Resurrection Dogmatics has also written an excellent post on Jesus' use of the Rabbinic interpretation of Torah entitled Jesus the Rabbinic Sage?

Perhaps there are some subtle ironies in American humour that I don't quite understand. I hope so, because this cannot be real. I offer you a sample of the wisdom of Rev. Sam Gipp:

"Liberals love to cry “The sky is falling!” concerning the earth’s oil reserves. Their argument seems to almost make sense, “Don’t pump all the oil or we won’t have anymore.” until you choose to use your brain rather than another CNN terror report. It’s like, “Hey Stupid! If we stop drilling now it will be as if we’ve already run out of oil! Duh!” Of course, if we stop drilling oil that will destroy the American economy and put Americans in three cylinder diesel Euro-cars, which is the goal of the Liberals who are holding our “free press” hostage. These liberals whine about how Americans refuse to embrace “almost car” and continue to cling to their SUV “dinosaurs.” In a recent Motor Trend magazine, the Euro-liberal editor even said that Americans should be forced into small cars by high government gas taxes. (I’m sure they don’t let this idiot use any sharp utensils when he eats. Oh course, do you need a fork for quiche?) Here’s my idea. Lets’ simply pump the earth’s oil reserves dry. That isn’t an irrational, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” right wing, conservative, anti-environmental macho statement..."

No, of course it isn't Sam, it sounds like a really sensible idea. I have the distinct feeling this man has never been abroad.

I especially like Dr Gipp's retelling of the story of Jonah. Here are Jonah's protests as to why he shouldn't go to Nineveh:

“But there are queers in public, they can’t pray in the schools, their movies are all obscene...they deserve Hell! I can’t wait to see You destroy the place. I’m not doing anything that would turn Your wrath away from them. If they believed the Bible like I do, I might consider it.”

"Believing the Bible" is such an odd expression when you think about it. It reminds me of a conversation I recently had with Jonny:

Me: Jonny, you know, I sometimes wonder if you really believe the Bible.

Jonny: Oh, I believe the Bible alright. I believe every word of it, including the chapter headings, verse numbers, contents page, table of weights and measures and the marginal notes. I believe ALL of it.

Last week Derek and I visited Sanctus at Sacred Trinity Church in Salford. It's the first time I've really visited an emerging church service so I felt like somewhat of a spiritual tourist. I was pleasantly surprised as to how much I enjoyed myself, and I'll probably visit again though throughout the service I couldn't help but hear the nagging criticisms of Emergent No at the back of my mind. Not because Emergent No write well-reasoned and sensible critiques of emerging culture (watching the Emergent No gals trying turn their barely coherent ramblings into sound theology is like watching Bambi attempt to ice skate. While drunk.), but because their raving Pharasaic witchuntery tends to stick in the mind after prolonged exposure. Perhaps I need to be exorcised.

Anyway, on to Sanctus...

There were probably about 12 of us altogether, and there was an informal cup of tea (how terribly English and wonderful) before the service (if that isn't subverting traditional church culture, I don't know what is.) and a chance to meet a few other people. The service itself took place in the sanctuary of the church were we all sat round in a semi-circle facing each other. The service was overseen by Ben, who led us into a time of silence before we began. I like silence in worship, it helps me focus on God so much more than the loud guitar hoo-ha of my charismatic days. We were off to a good start.

As we continued in silence, Ben lit the three candles that sat on a table in the middle of our semi-circle: "We meet in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit." Yes. Already more teaching on the trinity than in my four years of happy-clappydom. Next we had a few notices before Ben introduced the main theme that they would be looking at over the next few weeks, which was the Person of Jesus Christ. By way of introduction we had a Gospel reading followed by some interactive learning and discussion of our own perceptions of Jesus. Using various images that were provided, we had to choose one that reflected our understanding of Jesus form childhood, and one that reflected our understanding of Jesus now. Unsurprisingly, almost everyone opted for the picture of smiley Jesus talking to animals next to Lake Galilee for the childhood picture. Choices for a grown up understanding of Christ were more varied, which provoked some interesting discussion.

Next we proceeded to discuss the humanity and divinity of Christ (highbrow stuff this emerging lark) and what that meant for us as his followers. By way of introduction to the humanity of Christ we watched a clip from The Last Temptation of Christ (There, I told you! They're heretics! Burn them! Burn Brian Maclaren! Burn this blog! Burn everything!) that depicted Jesus being tempted in the wilderness. This was the cue for the discussion that followed - how was Jesus tempted? How human was he? What about Jesus denotes his humanity? It was a bit of a shout out the answers kind of session but I think that most people there found it helpful to rediscover the reality of Jesus' own temptations. Next we watched more of the film where Jesus' healings and exorcisms are depicted, and then we moved on to discuss the divinity of Jesus. How do we know that Jesus is divine? What does this mean for us now? I thoroughly enjoyed the open-forum discussion, though perhaps someone should have pointed out that miracles per se do not prove Jesus' divinity. We closed this part of the service with another Gospel reading.

In the final part of the service we got into small groups and tried to write a credal statement about Jesus based upon what we'd learned, and in such a way that we would be able to use it proclaim Jesus in the world in evangelism. Mine and Derek's creed bore a surprising resemblance to the Nicene Creed, though I'm sure that that's because we're so in tune with the Spirit and the communion of saints across the ages rather than any unconscious plagiarism. Ahem.

So that was the end of the service. In many ways I wasn't surprised by it, but I mean that in an absolutely positive sense. Perhaps the greatest insight into the EC came not in the service itself but in our conversation afterwards. Derek and I went along to the pub (Worldlings!) with Stephen, Lev, Dan and a few others for a bit of a natter about all things emerging. It's one area where I did find that the EC lived up to the stereotype, but again that's not a bad thing. The age group was about mid-twenties to mid-thirties (I think I was pretty much the youngest at 24) and almost everyone there had come to the EC after becoming tired of the dry/dull/legalistic/over-hyped charismatic and/or evangelical scene. They were all still passionate about God and Christian discipleship but were tired and disillusioned with much of contemporary Christianity, and a lot of what they said resounded with my own experiences of the modern church. There was, I think, a latent fear that sooner or later the EC would have to "settle down" and become a more formal movement if it is to continue. This is true of any group that wants to survive for any length of time, but I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing.

So do I have a future with the EC? Possibly. I don't think I'd ever join one permanently, but as a spiritually-nourishing supplement to my regular place of worship I think it's fairly likely.

I have to point out that my highlight of the evening was in the pub afterwards during a conversation with Dan:

Dan: Do I know you?

Me: I don't think so.

Dan: Do you blog?

Me: Yes.

Dan: Do you blog under the name of Sven?

Me: Yes!

Dan: Ah, so you're Sven from the internet.

Me: Yes! (Think: I'm famous at last!)

Dan: Ah, I used to read your blog but I don't anymore.

Me: Ah.

In my previous post on this subject I looked in part at the New Testament teaching on the inspiration of scripture, and this second part will look at the history of the doctrine of the inspiration of scripture in the western tradition. In the meantime, John and John have written a few posts defending inerrancy. Suffice to say I disagree, but by way of response I'll wait until the third (and possibly fourth) post in this series. The problem with defending scripture as the Word of God is that it struggles to account for the relationship with Christ as the Word of God, and tends to end up making the Bible another incarnation of the Word of God. No inerrantists worship the Bible of course, but that is the logical conclusion of equivocating the Bible with the Word of God, who is also Christ. There are also the important questions of God's self-revelation and the mediation of this self-revelation. I'm going to argue (eventually) that God's self-revelation has taken place in historical events, culminating in his supreme self-revelation in the person of Jesus Christ. This gave rise to a transmitted tradition about God's self-revelation in Christ, which in turn produced the texts that record God's self-revelation throughout history. This is not the same thing as saying that the texts themselves are God's self-revelation, or that together with Christ they constitute the Word of God.

Anyway, that's for another day, but given my continuing unemployment, it is a day that may come very soon. On to the history...

The Early Church

Despite what we saw in the last post, the early church still followed much Jewish and Hellenistic tradition by developing a doctrine of scripture that considered prophecy to be simply an ecstatic experience, though there is often little discussion on specific examples in either the scriptures or in early church history. Justin Martyr took such a view and considered that a prophet's words were not his own, but rather God's as he spoke directly through the prophet, and so by extension he understood biblical inspiration in the same way, that God was dictating directly through the human authors (see Dialogue with Trypho 115, Apology 1:36). At around the same time, the apologist Athenagoras also argued for a similar view of scripture, when he described the Spirit as "blowing like a flute" in the composition of the Bible (Legatio pro Christianis 9). There are also similar viewpoints in the work of Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and Ambrose, although none of the fathers seem particularly preoccupied with developing theories of inspiration and inerrancy. There are no really elaborate doctrines of inspiration in the early church, but there are at least some strong traditions about the nature of scripture that are frequently cited. The Bible is referred to as "holy scripture" (Theophilus of Antioch), "sacred writings" (Clement of Alexandria), "sacred books" (Origen) and "the divine writings" (Chryostom).

It was Origen who first began to think through the doctrine of inspiration as a subject by itself. Theophilus had stated that the writers of scripture were "bearers of the Spirit" but Origen differs from Theophilus slightly by simply stating that the scriptures were "from inspiration" (ex epipnoias) but that they were still "the divine words". By Origen's day the effects of Montanism had diminished the popularity of the view that saw charismatic experiences as the source of prophecy and inspiration. Nevertheless, Origen held that the biblical texts were not the works of men but came from the Holy Spirit (De Principiis 4:9). It seems clear that Origen saw the biblical texts as coming from God that was given to his people.

This led inevitably to the allegorical reading of scripture that took little or no interest in the historical setting of texts, but nevertheless Origen was somewhat of a realist when it came to understanding the composition of scripture. For instance in the Old Testament he notes that the prophets "voluntarily and consciously collaborated with the word that came to them" (Sermons on Ezekiel, frag. 6:1). Similarly, he notes that the New Testament writers were frequently offering their own opinions and interpretations, and admitted the possibility of error. Origen's answer to this problem was to search for the inspired word that was scattered in and amongst the main text, which culminated in his system that understood inspiration to have occurred in varying degrees, rather than uniformly throughout scripture.

Nevertheless, Origen still considered the scriptures to be the word of God, and that the Spirit worked through the human mind and will to produce the biblical text (Contra Celsum 7:3-4) and that the Spirit inspired the biblical writer (De Principiis 4:14). Yet Origen was still a long way from Jerome who said that the scriptures had been dictated ("dictare") through the writers (Ep. 120:10). What had changed during Origen's time was the understanding of the relationship between revelation and scripture. Scripture was generally no longer considered to merely be a witness to the living word, but to actually be the essence of the word of God. Ideas of dictation had still not caught on at this stage, though the Church now affirmed that God was "the author of scripture."

After Nicea: Ambrose and Augustine

The confession that God was the "author of scripture" was forcibly scrutinised during the fourth and fifth century as the result of a debate between the Church in Africa and the Manichees. The Manichees denied that God was the "writer" (scriptor) of the Bible, to which the African church replied that God was the "one author" (unus auctor) of both the OT and NT. Yet the term "author" is troublesome, since by itself it does not express or explain the phenomena of divine authorship. The African church sought simply to defend God as being the source of all scripture, without elaborating on the manner in which he is the author. The English word "author" denotes a rather mechanistic approach to the writing of scripture, which lends itself well to dictation theory, but in the original language of the latin confession auctor has rather broader connotations. Auctor can denote the founder of a city or institution, the designer and architect of a building, the causer of a woun, as well as the author of a document. It is an equivalent to the Greek archegos, which is used to denote God as the "author" of scripture, but also as the "cause" of creation, and should not be understood as meaning a strictly dictatorial method of inspiration.

Yet both Ambrose and Augustine (with some modifcation) largely accepted this view. Ambrose said that the scriptures are the very words of God, not man (Ep. 8:10), and that the words of God had somehow so filled the minds of the writers that they wrote God's own thoughts, not man's. Similarly Augustine understood that God virtually dictated the words of scripture that the human authors were little more than scribes, though this level of detail did not find its way into Church tradition, which simply affirmed that God is the "one author of scripture".

It is not uncommon to hear it declared that the church has never agreed upon a doctrine of scripture, but this is only half-true. The confession that "God is the one author of scripture" was used against the Montanists, the Waldensian confession (1200s) and was also recognised by the Council of Florence in 1441:

"It [the Church] professes one and the same God as the author of the Old and New Testament, that is, of the Law and the Prophets and the Gospel, since the saints of both Testaments have spoken with the inspiration in the same Holy Spirit, whose books, which are contained under the following titles it accepts and venerates.

Besides it anathematizes the madness of the Manichaeans, who have established two first principles, one of the visible, and another of the invisible; and they have said that there is one God of the New Testament, another God of the Old Testament."

Likewise the Council of Trent (1546) reiterated the traditional view of the inspiration of scripture:

"...truth and discipline are contained in the written books, and the unwritten traditions which, received by the Apostles from the mouth of Christ himself, or from the Apostles themselves, the Holy Ghost dictating, have come down even unto us, transmitted as it were from hand to hand; (the Synod) following the examples of the orthodox Fathers, receives and venerates with an equal affection of piety, and reverence, all the books both of the Old and of the New Testament--seeing that one God is the author of both --as also the said traditions, as well those appertaining to faith as to morals, as having been dictated, either by Christ's own word of mouth, or by the Holy Ghost, and preserved in the Catholic Church by a continuous succession."

I haven't missed out the Reformers, but simply wanted to show that the tradition of the church has held always held (though in different ways) that God is the auctor of scriptures.

Medieval views on inspiration

Like the early church Fathers, the scholastic period did not produce any great works on the doctrine of inspiration and inerrancy, and most of the discussion that did take place was as a subdivision of debates on the charism of prophecy, though the use of Greek philosophy at this time helped reshape some of the issues somewhat. Especially relevant to the question of inspiration is the question of causality and the various sub-types of causality As far as the question of inspiration goes, scholastic scholars spoke of the analogy of efficient and instrumental causality. Put simply, in the writing of a text the author is the chief efficient cause as he contributes the thought and choice of words. The pen with which he writes is the instrumental cause in the writing of a text. The idea for the text is in the mind of the author, but the pen will determine the shape and colour of the letters. Applied to the question of inspiration, the analogy argued that God is the chief efficient cause since he is the one whose mind and will are communicated, but the prophet or writer of scripture is the instrumental cause, and the prophet or writer will shape and give form to the final expression of God's mind and will in either spoken prophecy or the written text. This represents a significant development from the doctrine of the early church, since it recognises that while the thought and ideas in scripture originate with God, they are given form and expression by human beings who will determine what is finally said.

The Reformation

In the late medieval/early Reformation period the Spanish theologian Melchior Cano equated (as Jerome and others had done before him ) divine authorship with a mechanistic sense of verbal dictation. Based on his reading of Augustine and Jerome, Cano declared that "not only the words but even every comma has been supplied by the divine Spirit" and that therefore, the scriptures were inerrant (De Locis Theologicis, 2:17). Cano's idea was also to be found in the work of Calvin, although the three main Reformers (Calvin, Luther, and Zwingli) all varied somewhat in their understanding of inspiration and inerrancy.

Calvin continued with the traditional formulation that "God is the author of scripture". He also liked to speak of "dictation" and "scribes" to describe the relationship between God and the human authors of scripture. Of the human authors Calvin says: "they were certain and authentic amanuenses of the Holy Spirit" (Institutes IV:3,9) and also "Whenever we hear the word of God, this comes before us, that men have not invented what is contained in the Old and New Testaments, but God by a visible sign has testified, even as there was need, that men were organs solely of his Holy Spirit." Like Cano, Calvin also based this idea on the earlier writings of Jerome and Augustine. Yet it is still a significant leap to argue that Cano and Calvin's theories of inspiration imply a theory of mechanical inspiration, even though both Roman Catholics (yes, really) and modern evangelicals have opted for a literalistic notion of scriptural inspiration by following Calvin.

Unlike some of his followers however, Calvin was willing to acknowledge some errors in scripture. He not only noticed that many manuscript copyists had made mistakes, but that Paul and the NT authors often cited OT references incorrectly. Speaking of the biblical authors, Calvin said:

"For their preaching was both obscure as relating to distant objects, and was included in types. Moreover, however wonderful the knowledge displayed in them, as they were under the necessity of submitting to the tutelage common to all the people, they must also be ranked among children. Lastly, none of them ever had such a degree of discernment as not to savour somewhat of the obscurity of the age." (Inst. II:11,6)

Even in recognising the authority of scripture, Calvin is prepared to recognise both textual errors and the limitations of the authors themselves. They are not free of their own social and cultural contexts when writing scripture.

It would perhaps be going too far to say that Calvin was a Kantian before Kant, but he recognised the gap between the doctrine and fact of God and the words of scripture. Here are the roots of one of the problems with modern concepts of scripture as the word of God, in that they fail to recognise the difference between God himself and words about God, and that the Bible is not to be identified with the utterances and being of God himself, since the scriptures are a created reality that mediate the knowledge of the Creator. They are not the Creator himself.

Crucially, Calvin also takes the role of the Spirit into account in his work. Scriptural inspiration is not a past event that happened in isolation, it is a continous event that originates with the Divine Spirit. The Divine Spirit, working through (not from) the scriptures and "who has spoken through the mouths of the prophets must penetrate into our hearts to persuade us that they faithfully proclaimed what had been divinely commanded." (Inst.I:7,4) So it is clear even in Calvin that divine authorship and "dictation" does not equate to a human translation of directly uttered divine words, and neither does it imply that all scripture is free from error in every area that it addresses.

Zwingli (1484-1531) moved even further away from notions of verbal inspiration and acknowledged that the Bible was in occasionally in error in non-theological matters, and was inerrant only in its teaching on doctrine. Luther differed even more greatly from Zwingli, and had perhaps the most developed and dynamic doctrine of inspiration out of all the Reformers. His theory arose out of his recognition of the inseparability of the Word and Spirit (but they were not to be identified with each other). The presence of the Word in the Church is enabled by the continuing presence of the Spirit in the Church. Inspiration did not take place once in the past during the composition of scripture, but the Word of God was only the Word of God when it communicated God through the scriptures to the heart of the believer, the scriptures themselves were not the Word of God.

After the Reformation

You'll notice a slight gap in my attempt to give a brief outline of the history of the doctrine of inspiration in that I've missed out a great deal of evangelical tradition in the period following the Reformation. Firstly it's to save space because most of the readers of this blog will at leat be partly familiar with evangelical though on inspiration and inerrancy, and secondly, modern doctrines of inspiration and inerrancy have largely been formed in polemical circumstances that arose a few centuries after the Reformation, so I'm going to look at the nineteenth century and following in this final part of the post.

The rise of historical and textual criticism from the 1800s onwards has all but written off the most basic and naive notions of biblical inspiration and inerrancy that are not held by most Christians outside fundamentalist circles. What do you do, for example, when there are conflicting manuscripts? Which ones are inerrant and inspired? What about Biblical statements that contradict other parts of scripture, or other historical sources, and so on? Regrettably, much earlier critical work (Semler, von Herder, Griesbach, Strauss, Baur, Renan, etc.) ditched the notion of inerrancy and inspiration altogether and did not pursue it as a theological question (and it must be remembered that inspiration is a theological question, not one that can be answered by exegesis or historical investigation) but there were some who did.

Schleiermacher taught that it was the communication of the Spirit of Christ through the books that was important, whereas von Hoffman (1810-77) taught that the revelation was Christ, and that the scriptures recorded this revelation in human history. Building on this, Martin Kaehler declared that the scriptures were the means of preaching the Word of God, but this said nothing about the actual text itself.

The growth of historical criticism prompted the church to rethink and develop some of its doctrines of inspiration and inerrancy and the way in which the divine Word related to the Bible and the preaching of the Church. J. H. Newman noted in the late 1800s (although his work was not published until 1953) that the traditional teaching of the church had never actually declared that the actual texts themselves were inspired. The RCC did not make a full statement on inspiration and inerrancy until Vatican I in 1870, which built on the earlier declaration of the Council of Trent:

"The complete books of the old and the new Testament with all their parts, as they are listed in the decree of the said council and as they are found in the old Latin Vulgate edition,are to be received as sacred and canonical.

These books the Church holds to be sacred and canonical not because she subsequently approved them by her authority after they had been composed by unaided human skill, nor simply because they contain revelation without error, but because,being written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit,they have God as their Author,and were as such committed to the Church. "

Following Vatican I, the RCC flirted with ideas of partial or limited inspiraiton, as exemplified in the works of Père Lagrange. Lagrange developed a theory of verbal inspiration which declared that the words of scripture were written under divine influence, but not in the sense of God dictating to human scribes. Rather, the human author might draw from revelation, experience, and tradition when writing scripture, and as such the scriptures did not constitute a teaching in themselves, but rather they are a record of teaching that God has divulged, either through revelation, tradition, or personal experience. Lagrange was in some sense too far ahead of his time in the early 1900s, and his ideas were rejected by the RCC.

Although it may surprise many evangelicals, the RCC actually has a similarly high view of scripture to that which may be found in many evangelical confessions and declarations. Pius XII's encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu affirmed that:

"For just as the substantial Word of God became like unto men in all things except without sin, so the words of God, expressed in human language, became in all things like to human speech, except without error."

(Even the biggest RCC-hating fundamentalist would agree with the Pope on this one!) Although I still believe Pius XII to be incorrect at this point, his declaration is important because it recognises the need to take the reality of the human element of scripture into account (this, I think, is the essence of what Jim was driving at in the comments of this post).

This concludes this rather haphazard and concise look at the history of the doctrine of inspiration in the western church. There is of course much more to be mentioned, but a fairly accurate summary of the conservative evangelical position on inerrancy can be found in the Chicago Declaration On Inerrancy, whereas the closest thing to a theology of scripture I have found in the Eastern tradition can be read in the Greater Catechism of Philaret of Moscow. There are many more issues to discuss in regards to inspiration and inerrancy, and these will be the subjects of later posts. How do we talk about Christ being the Word of God incarnate and also as scripture being the Word of God without worshipping it as a second incarnation? What about the question of authority? How does scripture relate to tradition and experience? If scripture is the final and ultimate authority, where does that leave God? What about foundations of faith, or the preaching of the Word of God? Suffice to say I disagree with a lot of Chicago and also what John and John have written because they are theologically inconsistent, among other things, but I'll save that for another post.

"The words of the New Testament are the words of humans about the Word of God. They are a human attestation to the Word of God, be that the Word incarnate or the message. The human words of the Scripture are a manifestation of the phenomenon of inspiration but they do not have the ultimacy of the Word of God, nor even of the "very words of God," were it somehow possible for God to communicate with us in this fashion. All human language is a social phenomenon; it is necessarily bound to a time and a culture. Moreover all human language emobodies conventional symbols; there is a distance between the reality to which the symbol points and the symbol itself. If there is a distance between human words and the human experience to which these words, always inadequately, point, there is certainly a distance between human words and the divine-human experience to which they point with an innate inadequacy. The words of scripture point to the Word of God, but they cannot simply be equated with the word of God."

R. Collins

“God, in his free grace, determines Himself for sinful man and sinful man for Himself. He therefore takes upon Himself the rejection of man with all its consequences, and elects man to participation in His own glory.”

(Barth, Church Dogmatics II.2 Th.33)

“The expectation of a Last Judgement has always had a particular fascination for the imaginations of Christians. In medieval churches, we see the final judgement represented on the outside portals and in pictures inside: on the right hand side, angels carry the righteous away to the heaven of everlasting bliss; on the left devils drag the wicked into the hell of everlasting damnation; in the middle sits Christ on the judgement seat with the two-edged sword between his lips. In this great reckoning there are only two verdicts: eternal life or eternal death. Originally, hope for the Last Judgement was a hope cherished by the victims of world history, a hope that the divine justice would triumph over their oppressors and murderers. It was only after Constantine that Judgement – now orientated solely towards the perpetrators – was interpreted as a divine criminal tribunal where evil-doers were tried, and was understood as the prototype of imperial judicial power...

...What speaks against a double outcome of Judgment is the experience that God’s grace is more powerful than human sin. ‘But where sin increased, grace abounded all the more’ (Rom 5:20). In God himself, love outbalanced wrath, for God is angered by human sin not although he loves human beings but because he loves them. He says No to sin because he says Yes to the sinner. He says a temporal No because in eternity he has said Yes to human beings, as the beings he has created, and his image. He judges the sins of the world so as to save the world. ‘The Lord kills in order to bring life. He brings down to hell and out again.’ (1 Sam 2:6)...

…we must immerse ourselves in the depths of Christ’s death on Golgotha. It is only there that we find the certainty of reconciliation without limits, and the true ground for the hope for ‘the restoration of all things’, for universal salvation, and for the world newly-created to become the eternal kingdom...In the crucified Christ we recognize the Judge of the final Judgment, who has himself become one condemned, for the accused, in their stead and for their benefit. So at the Last Judgment we expect on the Judgment seat the One who was crucified for the reconciliation of the world and no other judge.

[Christian theology] assumes that in his suffering and dying Christ suffered the true and total hell of God-forsakenness for the reconciliation of the world, and experienced for us the true and total damnation of sin. It is precisely here that the divine reason for the reconciliation of the universe is to be found. It is not the optimistic dream of a purified humanity, it is in Christ’s descent into hell that is the ground for the confidence that nothing will be lost but that everything will be brought back again and gathered into the eternal kingdom of God.”

The Coming of God

I'm still getting a lot of pain in my hands and wrists so I'm not going to get stuck back into lengthy blog posts just yet, so if I can find a microphone I might do a podcast or two instead. The tendons in the 3rd, 4th and 5th fingers of both my hands are inflamed and they don't slide in and out of their little cartliage tubes properly. It hurts a lot to type for more than 3 or 4 minutes plus I can actually feel the tendons sticking as they try to move about properly, which is gross.

I've taken up cycling with a vengeance this week and managed 20 miles on Monday and another 30 miles today which is pretty good considering that this time last year I was so ill that I was sleeping for 16 hours a day and couldn't walk down the road without working up a fever. I've also updated my photo page a little bit.

Here a few noteworthy blog posts that I've enjoyed reading this week:

Richard is back from Israel and has posted his excellent essay outlining Anselm's doctrine of atonement. In your face, Calvin. Meanwhile the other Richard has written an excellent essay on the Anabaptists at Münster, it's a good deal better than my own feeble attempt. Dwight has also recently returned from Israel and has written an excellent contemplative-travelogue-theological piece on life in Jerusalem which I highly recommend you all read.

Mr Potter states a case for the use of liturgy in worship, while Mr Finger opens up some discussion on the creation narrative. Derek has also written an intriguing and controversial piece on neo-imperialism and the recent killings of Iraqi civilians by US soldiers, and John has also written a couple of excellent and topical posts on why the West is ignoring AIDS, and why the government's scheme for ID cards is a bad idea. John has actually written several posts on ID cards, and anyone with an interest in UK politics should read them.

Finally,  I've come across a few excellent blogs that are worth adding to your blogroll. First up is According to Jonathan, and second is The Thinkery.

I'm also toying with the idea of writing Christian creative non-fiction. It would be somewhat autobiographical (I should write more personal stuff, since this is by far my most popular post ever) but essentially it would be some key theological and ecclesial issues discussed within a fictional setting. Should I bother? I thought maybe a 256-part book series about the adventures of a group of fundies who prepare for the rapture and the reign of Antichrist only to realise that Preterism was a better way to understand NT prophecy and that Tim LaHaye is a muppet.