eschatology

On Transmillennialism and Kevin Beck's This Book Will Change Your World

Posted Tue, 26/05/2009 - 10:28 by andrew

I read Kevin Beck’s This Book Will Change Your World in response to some gentle and persistent prompting from Mike Morrell. As Mike observes, there are some interesting similarities and some distinct differences between Kevin’s exposition of Transmillenialism and the thesis of The Coming of the Son of Man and of Re: Mission. Some of the issues raised were addressed a few years ago in a post on Transmillennialism™ on Open Source Theology. I won’t go into great detail here but will list some of the thoughts that came to mind as I read the book, which hopefully will help to clarify the main points of agreement and disagreement.

Questions about Re: Mission

Posted Tue, 17/03/2009 - 16:04 by andrew

I came across some comments posted by Patrick in a nice conversation about ‘the future of Christian eschatology’ on Jesus Creed, which capture the sort of problems that many people have with the thesis of both The Coming of the Son of Man and Re: Mission. Rather than clog up Scott McKnight’s elegant blog with my self-justification, I have addressed the main points here. This is Patrick’s complaint:

…I spent some time struggling through Andrew Perriman’s Re:Mission: Biblical Mission for a Post-Biblical Church a while ago. As the title suggests he pushes his preterism so far that pretty well nothing in the Bible speaks to Christians today, we are ‘off the map’ in a post-Biblical age. Jesus never imagined Gentiles being added to the church; the kingdom has come and is no longer the hope of the church; the parousia has happened; even Phil 2:9-10 becomes a text fulfilled in the first century etc … I found this sort of radical historicism very destructive, it seemed to remove the Bible from the church - in contrast to N T Wright’s Surprised by Hope which seems to ‘balance’ historicism with the ‘not yet’ in a much more biblical and constructive way?

Critical Dutch review of The Coming of the Son of Man

Posted Sat, 01/11/2008 - 17:52 by andrew

My friend Dirk put me on to a review of my book The Coming of the Son of Man by Dr. Pieter Lalleman, who teaches New Testament at Spurgeon’s College in London. The review is in Dutch, so I have had to translate the main points of criticism as best I can. There is a rough summary of the argument of the book, in the course of which Lalleman, rather amusingly it seems to me, expresses his approval of Tom Wright as a biblical interpreter except with respect to what he has to say about the future, as though somehow eschatology can be disconnected from history: ‘Tom Wright is een geweldig goede Bijbeluitlegger en vrijwel alles wat hij schrijft is zeer de moeite waard. Alleen als het over de toekomst gaat, ben ik het absoluut met hem oneens.’ Then he presents four main objections to my thesis and some concluding remarks, which I will attempt to address here.

Reading Romans eschatologically

Posted Mon, 04/02/2008 - 17:57 by andrew

You may or may not have noticed that I have been working my way rather laboriously - and no doubt presumptuously - through an online commentary on Romans. What got me going on this was the growing conviction while writing Re: Mission that we may make better sense of this classic exposition of Paul’s core theology if we read it within the framework of an eschatological narrative that has to do with the realistic, biblically shaped expectations of Jesus and the early communities of disciples regarding their foreseeable future. What if Paul is not setting out timeless, universal principles or an abstract argument about ‘justification by faith’ but directly and with urgency addressing the historical situation of Israel and the emerging communities of Christ-followers in anticipation of the coming wrath of God on the ancient world?

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