In my Sunday School class yesterday we discussed Mark 15. We’re reading this with Allan Bevere’s Keeping Up with Jesus: A Narrative Devotional Commentary on Mark. In the thought questions for chapter 15, Allan asks both why Jesus is silent at his trial as depicted in Mark, and what it means that Jesus died for…
Via Dave Black, I found this post, which outlines the participles of this passage well. I have expressed my view on this passage previously, and it takes the participles into account and aligns with one of the positions suggested.
I encountered a question recently that I’d like to explore a bit. The question comes in three parts, or perhaps with three perspectives. When God commanded the Israelites to look to the bronze serpent to be healed, was God commanding idolatry? Why would God give this command? Was this a good command? It’s easy to…
I have often annoyed people by saying both that I believe in substitutionary atonement, though I prefer not to use “penal substitutionary atonement,” and also do not believe it is the sole reason for, view of, or metaphor to describe what God did in the atonement. So it’s nice to link to Roger Olson, who…
I’ve drawn some questions and produced some amusement (from Calivinist friends) by using the term “total depravity.” Listeners were surprised to hear a Wesleyan use that particular term. “Sinners,” “sinful,” and similar terms, OK, but total depravity? I have previously heard people remark that total depravity isn’t Wesleyan, so as United Methodists we don’t believe that….
My company, Energion Publications, recently released a book What’s God Really Like?. It’s endorsed by Brian Zahnd; In What’s God Really Like?, S. J. Hill invites us to become fascinated by God and, in that fascination, to move beyond the fear-based themes that have so often distorted our image of God. With a focus on Jesus and Scripture,…
One of the problems with understanding biblical talk about salvation is that we do not live with a sacrificial system. For many Christians, the whole idea of sacrifices is that someone sinned and a bloody sacrifice was required for atonement. Christians believe that because of one bloody sacrifice, that of Jesus on the cross, no…
This will continue the discussion, dealing more with definitions. In the area of soteriology (the study of salvation) we frequently make the same statements in terms of words and structure, yet mean something quite different by it. “Jesus died on the cross to save us from our sins” means quite different things, depending on who…
We’re going to start our look at Paul’s soteriology by reading Galatians 2:15-3:18 and looking at Bruce Epperly’s fourth lesson in Galatians: A Participatory Study Guide, “The Dynamics of Grace.” Here’s a quote: Three key words are present in Galatians – grace, justification, and faith. Put simply, grace is God’s love embodied in the life,…
