Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 09038. Ask most Christians how the church relates to the kingdom of God and you will get a puzzled pause. The two terms are used almost interchangeably in ordinary conversation. People speak of kingdom work when they mean church work, and of building the kingdom when they mean growing a congregation. The New Testament…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10145. There is an eschatological tension running through the New Testament that trips up almost every new reader of the Bible sooner or later. You are told you have been saved, and then told to work out your salvation. You are told you possess eternal life, and then told to lay hold of it….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10144. Inaugurated eschatology is the most widely held framework in evangelical scholarship today, and if you have read almost any modern commentary on the Gospels you have met it whether the phrase was used or not. It holds that the kingdom of God has genuinely begun with the coming of Jesus, yet awaits its…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10143. Realised eschatology is a phrase you will almost never hear from a pulpit and almost always hear in a lecture theatre, yet its influence has quietly reached a great many pulpits anyway. It is the view that the last things promised in Scripture have already arrived in the person and work of Jesus,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10142. Is God’s kingdom something I am living in now, or something I am waiting for? I get asked that more often than you might think, usually by someone who has been reading one author who insists it is entirely present and another who insists it is entirely future, and has concluded that theologians…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 10140. The kingdom of God is one of those phrases I hear used constantly and defined almost never. It turns up in prayers, in hymns, on conference banners and in casual conversation over coffee, and if I stopped ten believers in the church car park and asked each of them what it meant, I…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3067. Was Jesus a political revolutionary, executed for taking on an empire? Plenty of voices say so, and every age tries to recruit him; our politicised age has recruited him with both hands. To some he is a first-century liberation leader, a political revolutionary confronting Roman oppression and economic injustice. To others he is…