Tim Chester has written a short piece on ‘What to look out for in Mark’s Gospel’. What follows is a précis.
The big question in Mark’s Gospel is ‘Who is this?’ (Mk 4:41). Who is Jesus and what has he come to do?
1. The King who must die
Right at the beginning, Mark introduces us to Jesus as the Messiah and Son of God (Mk 1:1). Messiah (Christ) means ‘anointed one’, and this reminds us that the kings of Israel were anointed with oil. …
Marcus J. Borg describes himself as ‘moderate to liberal’ scholar. In setting out his ‘appreciative disagreement’ with Tom Wright (in response to the latter’s Jesus and the Victory of God), Borg homes in on the question of miracle. He sees the Gospels as a combination of ‘history remembered’ and ‘history metaphorized’. The first of these terms refers to those events that are recorded in the Gospels simply because they actually happened. The second term refers to other things that are related in the Gospels. …
The account (in Genesis 22) of how God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, is one of the most problematic in the whole of scripture. It seems to teach that blind, irrational faith is a ‘good thing’, even the result is that you are willing to slaughter a member of your own family because you think that God has told you to do it. Of, course, God prevented Abraham from killing Isaac in the end (Gen 22:12), but that does not seem to get us off the hook: we presume that Abraham would have gone through with the terrible deed if God had not intervened.…
What does gospel (that is to say, evangelical and reformed) spirituality look like? Peter Adam writes:-
Christ is the mediator of the revelation of God, so this spirituality is Christ-centred, responding with faith in Jesus Christ, and especially to his saving death and resurrection.
Christ has revealed the Father, so this spirituality is that of trust in God our Father, his love and kindness in Christ, and his sovereign and providential rule over everything.…
Paul describes, in vv15-24, a high level of emotional turmoil. But who is the “I” of this passage? Is it Paul himself, or someone else? And is the state he describe that of a believer, or an unbeliever; a regenerate, or an unregenerate person?
It is true, as Moo says, that what Paul says about the law still amounts to much the same thing, whatever conclusion one arrives at: ‘One can preach this paragraph, in its basic intention, without even making a definite identification of the ‘ego’.’ …
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A book by Philip Pullman : ‘The good man Jesus and the scoundrel Christ’. This reflects the popular distinction between ‘the Jesus of history’ and ‘the Christ of faith’; the simple Galilean teacher, as depicted in the Gospels, and the exalted object of the church’s worship, as found in the Epistles.
How is Jesus actually presented in this, the earliest and shortest of the Gospels; the one that most emphasises his humanness? Let’s call four witnesses.…
Last night, the BBC screened its 90-minute drama ‘The Ark’.
It was a re-telling, by Tony Jordan, of the celebrated biblical story of Noah (variations of which circulated in other ancient cultures).
Those who confuse the ‘traditional’ children’s version of this story with the biblical version complain that we don’t get to see the animals go into the ark. I was surprised to see Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali being (mis?)quoted as seemingly objecting to the animals being ‘banned’ from the ark in this film.…
Until recently (writes N.T. Wright in Jesus and the Victory of God), it was generally assumed that ‘repentance’ was a major theme in the teaching of Jesus, and that this meant more or less the negative side of personal conversion. His message was one of divine grace, in contrast to the prevailing legalism of Judaism. It is now ‘widely recognised’, says Wright, that this involved a ‘complete caricature’, both of Judaism and of the teaching of Jesus. …
Moses is the most prominent human character in Torah. He leads the Israelites out of Egypt, and guides them towards Canaan. He mediates the laws the Yahweh revealed on mount Sinai.
Critical scholars point out that there is no extrabiblical biblical evidence that Moses was a real, historical, person. The accounts of him in Scripture were compiled centuries after the events they purport to describe.
According to Jeffrey Stackert, there is not one Moses in the Old Testament, but four. …
