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God's Holy Nation

Observing the online reaction to my column, I fear I was misunderstood. Some apparently read it as a brief for the primacy of the “spiritual” over the “political.” That isn’t my view. I advocate instead the deconstruction of the spiritual/political dualism and the primacy of ecclesial politics. Continue Reading »

High Gospel Christology

Yesterday I wrote about the broad argument in Richard B. Hays book, Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness. It’s a useful book, although oddly positioned. On the one hand, it can work to help biblically literate but non-specialized Christians better to understand . . . . Continue Reading »

The God Who Names Himself

The whole Bible is a single, unified text with theological coherence. In it the one supreme and true God, the God who has forever known himself as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, reveals himself to his people in personal self-disclosure. The initial five books of the Bible, called the . . . . Continue Reading »

A New Christian Zionism

Critics of Christian Zionism usually dismiss it for one or more of three reasons: 1. They say it makes mincemeat of the New Testament, where (it is alleged) the Old Testament focus on a particular land is replaced by the vision of a whole world; 2. They think it is the exclusive concern of premillennial dispensationalists, whose theology supposedly uses Jews to advance its own role in presumptuous schedules of End Time events; 3. It is said to be more political than theological, attached to right-wing American and Israeli political parties that wrongly identify the current Israeli state with the eschaton.Scholars at a recent conference at Georgetown made the case for a “new” Christian Zionism that takes a fresh approach to all three of these problems. Continue Reading »

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