Melissa Zaldivar on Loss

Every month, The Good Book Company make available digital versions of one of their books at no charge. This month (November 2024) it’s What Cannot Be Lost: How Jesus Holds Us Together When Life Is Falling Apart, by Melissa Zaldivar, which is available in exchange for an email address here.

Andrew Perrett and Louise Robinson on Chronic Pain

Cambridge Papers are published once a quarter and address a wide range of topics, offering ‘Christian reflection on contemporary issues’.

The latest paper is available online here (from where a pdf can be downloaded here):

Andrew Perrett and Louise Robinson, ‘A Christian Response to Chronic Pain’, Cambridge Papers 33, 3 (September 2024).

Here is the summary:

‘The chances are that you know someone who lives with chronic pain, whether you are aware of it or not. Chronic pain is a specific type of suffering which is invisible, unpredictable and long-lasting. We discuss how this presents a particular set of challenges and hurdles to the sufferer, their loved ones and the wider church family, and we also share a personal example of living with chronic pain. Chronic pain demands a response; here we seek to bring biblical light to help people of faith who are seeking to respond well.’

Adam Mabry on When God Seems Gone

Every month, The Good Book Company make available digital versions of one of their books at no charge. This month (September 2024) it’s When God Seems Gone: Finding Hope When Nothing Makes Sense by Adam Mabry, which is available in exchange for an email address here.

Centre for Public Christianity (June 2023)

Among other items, the Centre for Public Christianity has posted a ‘Life and Faith’ interview (here) with Jo Swinney. ‘the eldest daughter of A Rocha founders Peter and Miranda Harris, about family, friendship, creation care, and the things that sustain us when tragedy strikes’.

More from the Centre for Public Christianity (March 2023)

Among other items, the Centre for Public Christianity has just posted a ‘Life and Faith’ interview with Kaitlyn Facista, who runs the online fan community Tea with Tolkien, and an interview with  Bruce Robinson on how to cope with pain in a positive, life-affirming way.

The Big Picture Magazine on Difficult Hope

The Big Picture is a new-ish magazine from the Kirby Laing Centre, which is already on its fourth issue.

This one is devoted to the topic of ‘Difficult Hope’, as Istine Rodseth Swart signals in the Editorial:

‘Pain and suffering get our attention. The problem of pain and suffering is high on the list of reasons why many reject God and if we are honest with ourselves, why being a Christian is not for the fainthearted. As believers we are not exempt from affliction, travail and catastrophe, but we have an additional challenge: How do we respond appropriately, biblically?’

More information is available here, and the issue can be downloaded as a double spread pdf here and a single scroll pdf here.

Online versions of the previous issues of the magazine are available from here.

On Learning to Lament

The below is an excerpt from an email written for the congregation where I am one of the pastors.

How could God allow that to happen? If God is good, why is there so much suffering in the world? Why doesn’t he just fix everything?

Perhaps you’ve been asked questions like those. Perhaps you’ve asked them yourself, possibly even over the last few weeks.

How we respond depends, at least in part, on whether the questions are being asked from the perspective of an ‘armchair’ or a ‘wheelchair’. In some cases, the issue of suffering is little more than an intellectual challenge to the existence of God, and is asked from the relative comfort of a conversation between friends or in a radio phone-in discussion. In other cases, the questions are heartfelt cries from those who are themselves in agony, broken, and completely bewildered with the misery of pain, evil, and injustice in a messed-up world.

The contrast between philosophical and personal engagements with suffering can be seen in the writings of C.S. Lewis. As a university don, he wrote a book called The Problem of Pain, in which he argues from a theological and philosophical perspective that human pain, animal pain, and hell are not sufficient reasons to reject belief in a loving and all-powerful God. But, as a devoted husband, he wrote a book called A Grief Observed, reflecting on his experience of bereavement following the death of his wife from cancer. Which book is more helpful? Which is more truthful? Which is more authentic? Both, at different times of life? Each in its own way?

It’s in the pain of bereavement that Lewis writes: ‘Meanwhile, where is God? ... Go to him when your need is desperate, when all other help is in vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.’

Some of us might be able to relate to that. Certainly the psalmists could.

Would it surprise you to learn that laments are the largest category of prayers in the book of Psalms? Take a moment to reflect on that: what might it mean that the Holy Spirit has so overseen the writing of Scripture such that over a third of the Psalms bring a troubled situation to the Lord – not in a cold, detached way but from a place of deep agony? What does that say about our own expectations of the way things should go? How are such prayers to shape our own prayer life?

In every case, these psalms allow an honest response to God in prayer from the depths of the broken hearts of his hurting people, even to ask those challenging questions: Where are you, Lord? How long, Lord? They provide a way to pray through a period of crisis, grief, or despair. They give us the words to express our brokenness, our need, our longing for justice. Most importantly of all – and contrary to what we might think at first – they demonstrate trust in God, because they’re addressed to the only one who really does hold all things in his hands.

On Being Overwhelmed [Redux]

I wrote this piece for ‘Connecting with Culture’, a weekly email service provided by the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity. If it sounds familiar to the two regular readers of my blog (Hi, Mum! Hi, Brett!), that’s because it’s a beefed-up version of a piece I wrote last week.

It was Harold Wilson who allegedly said that ‘a week is a long time in politics’. In these recent momentous days, it looks as if that should be reduced to five minutes.

In the space of a very short time, life has been turned upside-down. Work, school, family life, daily routines, leisure activities, as well as that number one pastime – shopping – have changed for all of us, almost overnight.

It’s easy to see why our nation – nay, our world – is uneasy. You may feel it yourself, identify it in friends and colleagues, or see it reflected in your social media feeds. We’re experiencing what theologian David Ford has called ‘multiple overwhelmings’. Whether personally, professionally, or politically, it’s one thing to have a single event that knocks us off our feet. But what if the knocks continue to come thick and fast? Is it any wonder we’re confused, anxious, distrustful, and fearful?

In all this, though, shafts of light manage to break through – the neighbours forming WhatsApp groups to support people in their street, the already-exhausted NHS workers coming in for the next shift, the rainbows in windows of houses saying more than the occupants of those homes perhaps know about the commitment of God to his creation.

They’re all traces of grace, showing something of a refusal to be shaped by the prevailing culture, which Christians of all people should understand. Because while some ‘overwhelmings’ wound and crush us, others are life-giving and transformative. As David Ford says, the wisest way to cope is ‘not to expect to be in control of everything’, but ‘to live amidst the overwhelmings’ in a way that lets one of them shape the others.

During this period of Lent, Christians remember that Christ himself embodied ‘multiple overwhelmings’ – baptised in the Jordan, driven into the wilderness, tempted by the devil. Then, at the climax of his life, betrayed, deserted, tortured, crucified. But, as Ford writes, ‘then came the resurrection, the most disorienting and transformative overwhelming of all’.

Given that death-and-resurrection pattern, what would it look like at this time to be overwhelmed by gratitude? Overwhelmed by generosity? Overwhelmed by a commitment to pray? Overwhelmed by a desire to see others thrive, even if it comes at our expense? Overwhelmed by an assurance of God’s love?

Given the resources available to us in the gospel, what might we be overwhelmed by today?

Not Without God

The below is an edited version of a piece I wrote for the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, which I thought I’d post again for the anniversary (which was yesterday) five years later.

‘If we held 1 minute of silence for every victim of the Holocaust then we would be silent for eleven and a half years.’ So several tweeted yesterday on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Although powerfully distressing in its own way, not to stall on some disagreement over the maths, others understandably took considerably more space than 116 characters to unfold the horrors of what took place, with survivors urging that the tragedy never be forgotten.

Not for the first time are we challenged to ask how millions of men, women, and children were murdered with planned and systematic efficiency. Nor does what has since taken place in Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, Syria and elsewhere leave us hopeful that we have moved on. We are probably not surprised that the involvement of ‘religious’ people in what happened at Auschwitz has been enough to rid some people of any kind of belief in a good God.

Indeed, there are some experiences of evil before which we defend our faith only with deep sensitivity. We listen with deference to those like Elie Wiesel who speak for the victims. In Night, an account of his experience in concentration camps, Wiesel describes in painful and graphic detail his first viewing of a hanging, with the haunting question of the man behind him, ‘Where is God now?’.

And yet, in a television interview years later, Wiesel affirmed: ‘For a Jew to believe in God is good. For a Jew to protest against God is still good. But simply to ignore God, that is not good. Anger, yes. Protest, yes. Affirmation, yes. But indifference to God, no. You can be a Jew with God; you can be a Jew against God; but not without God.’ For Wiesel, the consequences of leaving God out of the Holocaust are worse than keeping him in.

From a Christian perspective, it’s right to have a problem with evil. It’s an alien intrusion into God’s good world. But the gospel allows us to understand the gravity of evil, our complicity in it, and God’s determination to deal with it. And for Christians, God’s wisdom and power are seen supremely in the death of Jesus, who died to destroy the power of sin and death, and was raised as the firstfruits of a new creation. There is a hope of unending joy for the earth – but not without God.

Currents in Biblical Research 17, 3 (June 2019)

The latest Currents in Biblical Research recently arrived, with titles and abstracts of the main articles as below.

Chloe Sun

Recent Research on Asian and Asian American Hermeneutics Related to the Hebrew Bible

Compared to Eurocentric biblical interpretations, Asian and Asian American hermeneutics is a relatively late phenomenon. Yet in the past three decades it has gradually emerged as one of the critical interpretations in contemporary scholarship. The common themes shared among Asian and Asian American hermeneutics revolve around the issues and intersections of identity, race, gender, class, liberation, and how one’s social location shapes the ways in which one interprets scripture. As regards Asian and Asian American hermeneutics related to the Hebrew Bible, the book of Exodus has received particularly broad attention due to its migration and liberation motifs. In addition, border-crossing characters and characters with hybrid identities, such as Moses, Ruth, Hagar, Daniel, and Esther, become key subjects for theological reflection. Methodologies are centered on ethnographical, feminist, postcolonial, intercontextual, and culturally specific perspectives such as Dalit and Minjung theologies, as well as LGBTQ readings. As Asian and Asian American hermeneutics related to the Hebrew Bible continues to flourish, the future of this particular way of reading scripture will likely include intersectional and integrational approaches and reception history, and will contribute to the broad interpretive spectrums of the twenty-first century.

Shawn J. Wilhite

Thirty-Five Years Later: A Summary of Didache Scholarship Since 1983

This article provides a summary of Didache scholarship over the past 35 years (1983–present). The review of literature focuses on the individual participants, including notable Didache scholars such as Jonathan Draper and Clayton Jefford, and the field’s respective contributions to Didache research. This article directly considers the vision of the Didache and its role in early Christianity via the literature of participants in Didache research. I consider the individual treatments of numerous Didache scholars and a list of their publications. In the conclusion, I highlight some points of agreement and disagreement to prompt further areas of specific research. I offer four suggestions to continue the work in Didache studies: (1) Wirkungsgeschichte and reception theory; (2) social-scientific methodologies (social identity theory; self-categorization theory); (3) exclusive attention given to H54; and (4) intertextual concerns beyond the Gospel of Matthew and Epistle of James.

Wesley Thomas Davey

Playing Christ: Participation and Suffering in the Letters of Paul

Paul’s theology of suffering has been the subject of a spate of recent scholarly investigations. This article provides a roadmap for the burgeoning conversation, doing so by targeting two objectives. First, it offers a historical account of the origin of interest in the concept of ‘participation with Christ’ in the Pauline letters. The genesis of participation studies played an indispensable role in catalyzing research into Paul’s perspective on suffering, as the article shows. Second, with that stage set, the article then turns to highlight authors who focus more narrowly on ‘suffering as participation with Christ’ in the letters of Paul. Although the current conversation about Paul’s theology of suffering hosts a wide array of approaches and opinions, there is a broad consensus that Paul interprets believers’ suffering as an indispensable part of what it means to be united to a crucified Lord.

Sarit Kattan Gribetz and Lynn Kaye

The Temporal Turn in Ancient Judaism and Jewish Studies

Despite the apparent finality of Heschel’s pronouncement, in 1951, that Judaism is a ‘religion of time’, the past two decades have seen renewed scholarly interest in the relationship between time, time-keeping, and forms of temporality in Jewish culture. This vibrant engagement with time and temporality in Jewish studies is not an isolated phenomenon. It participates in a broader interdisciplinary examination of time across the arts, humanities and sciences, both in the academy and beyond it. The current article outlines the innovative approaches of this ‘temporal turn’ within ancient Judaism and Jewish studies and reflects on why time has become such an important topic of research in recent years. We address a number of questions: What are the trends in recent work on time and temporality in the fields of ancient Judaism and Jewish studies? What new insights into the study of Judaism have emerged as a result of this focus on time? What reasons (academic, historiographical, technological and geopolitical) underpin this interest in time in such a wide variety of disciplines? And finally, what are some new avenues for exploration in this growing field at the intersection of time and Jewish studies? The article identifies trends and discusses key works in the broad field of Jewish studies, while providing more specific surveys of particular developments in the fields of Second Temple Judaism, Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls, rabbinic literature, and some medieval Jewish sources.

Knowing and Doing (Spring 2019)

The Spring 2019 edition of Knowing & Doing – ‘A Teaching Quarterly for Discipleship of Heart and Mind’ – from the C.S. Lewis Institute is now available online (from here), and contains the following articles:

Joel Woodruff

President’s Letter: It’s About Transformation in Community, not Information in Isolation

Joel Woodruff challenges us to resist the tide of individualism and seek spiritual growth in community. Rather than pursuing “information in isolation,” the C.S. Lewis Institute President urges us to learn from and challenge others as we grow in Christ.

Thomas A. Tarrants, III

Persecution and Suffering for Jesus Christ

Looking at the process of discipleship from the opposite side of most discussions, Tom Tarrants raises the important, albeit disturbing, topic of persecution for the sake of the gospel. Jesus warned many times that his disciples would face specific trials that come from following him. This article helps us prepare for those inevitable trials.

Tom Schwanda

Biblical Foundations for Growing in Intimacy with God

Tom Schwanda steps back from practical considerations about discipleship and begins to explore the Biblical foundations for spiritual growth. This is the first of a three part series that reflects deeply on why we need intimacy with Christ, how scripture sets the platform for it, and then offers suggestions for pursuing that noble goal.

Bill Kynes

How to Read the Bible, Part 1: Introduction and Overview to the Bible

The role of the Bible in spiritual life is often assumed but not as often pursued the way it should be. Bill Kynes begins a four part series that considers how to read, study, and meditate on the Bible. He begins with a reminder that the Bible’s overall storyline must be the context in which we examine any specific passage.

Bryan Hollon

Catechesis and Christian Discipleship

Bryan Hollon points us to a topic that rarely is addressed in contemporary discussions of spiritual growth – the role of catechesis in spiritual formation. Many people don’t even know what that word means. Hollon defines, describes, and encourages systemic training in doctrine and theological reflection.

Joseph Loconte

War, Friendship, and Imagination: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918

Joe Loconte reveals to us some of the ways C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien found faith in some of the most unlikely settings – the battlefields of World War I. While many people lost faith in God because of the carnage they experienced during those dark days, Lewis and Tolkien were transformed for eternal beauty. And their friendship after those days encourages all of us in profound ways.

Aaron Welty

Modern Mythology Matters

Just as C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien looked to mythology and story as ways to experience the storyline of the gospel, Aaron Welty shines a similar light on comic book heroes and the appeal they draw through today’s blockbuster movies. If Lewis could create Narnia and Tolkien could tell of Middle Earth, perhaps Superman and Marvel movies could point people to a better “savior.”

William Cowper (1731-1800)

Love Constraining to Obedience

C.S. Lewis loved poetry and wished he could be remembered most for his poems. They grab us in different ways than stories or prose. In each issue we feature a poem. William Cowper’s offering tilts our hearts toward obedience and joy.

Dwight L. Moody

Sermon – The Christian’s Warfare

The great evangelist and preacher Dwight L. Moody didn’t shy away from weighty topics. This sermon on spiritual warfare is a welcome reminder of the nature of our experience in a fallen world.

Broken Covenant

I co-wrote (with friend and colleague, Nell Goddard) this week’s ‘Word for the Week’, a weekly email service from the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity, currently reflecting on Lamentations during this period of Lent.

The Lord has given full vent to his wrath;
he has poured out his fierce anger.
He kindles a fire in Zion
that consumed her foundations...

But it happened because of the sins of her prophets
and the iniquities of her priests,
who shed within her
the blood of the righteous.

Lamentations 4:11, 13

The hope of chapter 3, it seems, has faded, and the present reality of the suffering is described as the poet contrasts the ‘then’ of pre-siege Jerusalem with the ‘now’ of today’s suffering.

But even more than that, the poet now seems to be seeking out someone or something to blame for the situation in which Jerusalem finds herself. And the answer is clear: ‘The Lord has given full vent to his wrath... it happened because of the sins of her prophets and the iniquities of her priests.’

The judgment of God has come upon Jerusalem because the leaders disregarded justice and sinned against God, ignoring countless warnings and failing to adhere to his laws, and so he has ‘poured out his fierce anger’.

To talk about suffering as a punishment from God is to venture into difficult territory. Suffering is a multi-faceted issue in the Bible, with different parts of Scripture addressing it from different perspectives. It is, of course, important to remember that not all suffering is a punishment from God.

Lamentations, however, is clear that the particular suffering it describes does come about as a direct result of God’s doing. It is not always easy to discern the difference between this type of suffering and that which is merely a natural outworking of our own actions, and we must always be careful not to go beyond the Bible in deciding what counts as God’s punishment and what does not.

The whole thrust of this book, however, suggests that the poet is aware that God is ultimately responsible for bringing about the suffering they are experiencing. This matches with all the warnings of the prophets of the exile, like Zephaniah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah himself, all of whom warn the people in no uncertain terms that God himself will judge them if they continue to break the terms of his covenant with them. This, in turn, goes back to the warnings of Moses in Deuteronomy 28 and elsewhere which say that the Lord himself will be active in bringing about the covenant curses resulting in the sort of suffering portrayed in Lamentations.

As we have seen in the rest of the book, these are deep questions to which there are no simple answers. There are great mysteries here.

If nothing else, they must cause us to throw ourselves afresh on God’s mercy demonstrated supremely in the cross of Jesus Christ.

Logos Questions

The Logos Institute for Analytic and Exegetical Theology at the University of St Andrews is producing a series of short (10-pages or so) booklets – ‘Logos Questions’ – on various issues in analytic and exegetical theology.

The authors and titles of the first three are listed below, and the booklets are available to download as pdfs from here.

Jonathan Curtis Rutledge

Why Would a Good God Allow Suffering?

R.T. Mullins

Can God Change?

Joshua Cockayne

Why Bother Using Religious Rituals?

Word and World 3 (2017)

Word and World, published by IFES, ‘aims to promote conversation and reflection about God’s Word and God’s World’, seeking ‘to enable those involved in student ministry to be nourished by the gospel and attentive to the world that students inhabit’.

The current issue explores persecution and suffering, from the days of the early church to a variety of modern contexts, including Iraq, Gabon, and Nigeria.

Knowing and Doing (Spring 2017)

The Spring 2017 edition of Knowing & Doing – ‘A Teaching Quarterly for Discipleship of Heart and Mind’ – from the C.S. Lewis Institute is now available online (here as a pdf), and contains the following articles:

Joel Woodruff

President’s Letter – Looking for Adventure?

Joel S. Woodruff, President of the C.S. Lewis Institute, encourages believers to a life of adventure. What great adventure can be found by those who commit to Jesus’ great commission and answer his adventurous call to discipleship?

George Marsden

A Biography of Mere Christianity

C.S. Lewis’s book Mere Christianity has a claim to being one of the most important religious works of the twentieth century. In this article, George Marsden discusses the origins of the book and its reception, as well as the factors that give the book its ongoing vitality.

Tom Schwanda

The Emergence of Evangelical Discipleship: Learning to Walk with Jesus

In this article, Tom Schwanda discusses how the early evangelicals of the eighteenth century sought to walk with Jesus, and what we can learn from them in following Jesus as his disciples today.

Bill Kynes

Growing in Prayer Part 2: Learning to Pray to Your Father

Jesus’ disciples asked, “Lord, teach us to pray.” In this article, Bill Kynes addresses what Jesus taught in response to that request.

Joe Kohm, Jr.

The Wisdom of Jane Eyre

This article considers the lessons we can learn about how to live today from reading Charlotte Brontë’s mid-nineteenth century novel Jane Eyre.

Kevin J. Vanhoozer

Does a Red-Faced God Sing the Blues? Emotions, Divine Suffering, and Biblical Interpretation

Kevin Vanhoozer explores how we should understand, in a clear and biblical way, divine emotional attributes as part of our overall understanding of God.

Randy Newman

First Steps to Loving and Understanding Our Jewish Neighbors

In this excerpt from his book Engaging with Jewish People: Understanding Their World, Sharing Good News, Randy Newman considers the question: Who are the Jewish people?

Thomas A. Tarrants III

The Priority of Prayer

From the time of the apostles and throughout church history, the kingdom of God has moved forward through prayer. This article discusses the need to rediscover the power of prayer, and the path for doing so.

Crucible 7, 2 (November 2016)

The latest issue of Crucible, published by the Australian Evangelical Alliance and largely produced by the faculty of the Australian College of Ministries, is now available online here, with the below articles (abstracts included, where available).

The Cauldron: peer reviewed articles

Andre van Oudtshoorn

Love Child: The use of 1 Corinthians 13 beyond its original context and intent

In this article, I use the metaphor of the family to explore the potential of 1 Corinthians 13 to transcend its original purpose and context and participate as the living Word of God across different contexts and for different purposes. I argue that a text is born through the integration of a textual-Father (the implied author's purpose), and a contextual-Mother (the implied context). While many post-modern scholars argue that a text should be viewed as an orphan without any roots to the author or original context, I show that love in 1 Corinthians 13 has its own unique character which enables it to transcend its original context and purpose without losing its identity as the offspring of a particular textual-Father and a particular contextual-Mother. I argue that love is characterised by the way it operates within the eschatological tension between the already and the not yet within the church and also in the realm of epistemology.

Dean Smith

Growing pains: a reflection on the experience of suffering accompanying an epistemological crisis

The experience of suffering is ubiquitous and often the subject of attention by pastoral practitioners and theologians alike. The particular kind of suffering that is addressed in this paper is the suffering accompanying an epistemological crisis. For one facing such a crisis, the traditional schema of interpretation has broken down irremediably in highly specific ways, to the point where not only individual beliefs, but the entire belief system, fails to provide the explanatory power it once did. In other words, the world no longer makes sense. For a person facing such a crisis the loss of meaning and the inability to make sense of their world and their life can be experienced as intense suffering that inevitably has broader implications than those of a purely individual nature such as psychological, emotional and intellectual. For as Alasdair MacIntyre acknowledges an epistemological crisis is always a crisis in human relationships. In this paper I explore the notion that if properly understood within the context of normal faith development as outlined by James Fowler, an epistemological crisis can be interpreted as the growing pains signalling personal development and maturity. Such an interpretation may not only bring relief to the sufferer but has implications for the broader faith community.

The Test-tube: ministry resources

Craig Tucker

To Revitalise or Replant?

Geoff Eggins

The Viability of Missional Small Groups in Australian Churches

This article and associated research discusses the legitimacy of the use of missional small groups in the Australian context. Firstly, it overviews the use of missional small groups in the New Testament. Secondly, investigates the perceptions of the church in the Australian culture. Thirdly, it offers a brief evaluation of where the missional church movement is up to in the Australian Church. Fourth, examples of the historic use of missional small groups are given in order to discern their validity and usefulness in other contexts. Fifth, a survey and associated analysis is undertaken to discern their current scope of use in the Australian context. This survey then informs the discussion with contextually relevant information. Finally, based on the above elements, a recommendation that Australian churches should pursue missional small groups is given, along with recommendations about how to help that happen.

The Filter: book reviews

International Bulletin of Missionary Research 39:2 (April 2015)

The latest issue of International Bulletin of Missionary Research carries several feature articles on the theme of ‘Hostility against Mission’.

Here are the opening paragraphs from J. Nelson Jennings’ Editorial:

‘Theodicy, or vindicating God in light of the existence of evil, is a relatively safe philosophical exercise. Actually undergoing suffering inflicted by hostile opponents, however, is excruciating trauma. The former presents a genuine intellectual challenge to faith; the latter brings debilitating pain and anguish. Reports from around the world suggest that more persecution and more martyrdoms have occurred during the past two to three generations than in all previous history. Indications are that the trend will continue or even increase.

‘Participants in Christian mission are, quite obviously, not the only people who suffer brutal attacks or systematic oppression. Moreover, specifically religious motivations for harming Christ’s servants are often intertwined with or even overshadowed by political, ethnic, economic, social, historical, or other driving factors. Even so, hostile actions against missionaries and others associated with Jesus Christ are proportionally higher than statistical projections would lead one to expect, whether or not those acts have been primarily religiously motivated.’

The issue includes an essay by Chris Wright on Lamentations, excerpted and adapted from his forthcoming ‘Bible Speaks Today’ commentary on that book.

The whole issue is available as a pdf here.

Jeremy Treat on the Kingdom and the Cross

A while back, I posted (here) on Jeremy Treat’s excellent book, The Crucified King: Atonement and Kingdom in Biblical and Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2014).

The Gospel Coalition have posted a short piece by him – ‘Kingdom and Cross: What God Has Joined Together, Let Not Man Separate’ – which does a great job of summarising the overall gist of the book.

Here are some taster paragraphs:

‘The kingdom and the cross ultimately are held together by the Christ, the one who reigns over the kingdom and suffers on the cross. But Jesus is no generic superhero; he is the messiah, the promised one of the unfolding story of a gracious God who has covenanted with Israel to restore his broken creation. This grand story of redemption provides the proper framework for understanding the connection between the kingdom and the cross.’

‘In short, the kingdom and the cross are held together by the Christ – Israel’s messiah – who brings God’s reign on earth through his atoning death on the cross. The kingdom is the ultimate goal of the cross, and the cross is the means by which the kingdom comes. Jesus’ death is neither the failure of his messianic ministry nor simply the prelude to his royal glory, but the apex of his kingdom mission; the cross is the throne from which Jesus rules and establishes his kingdom.’

Christopher Ash on Reasons to Study the Book of Job

Anticipating the imminent publication of his commentary on Job in Crossway’s ‘Preaching the Word’ series, Christopher Ash highlights seven reasons for studying the book of Job.

Studying the book of Job will help you...

1. Understand God for who He is

2. Grapple with God’s sovereignty

3. Reject false gospels

4. Identify with those who suffer

5. Find hope in the midst of pain

6. Develop your emotional pallet

7. Encounter the living God

Andrew Williams on Biblical Lament and Political Protest

The latest Cambridge Paper from the Jubilee Centre is available online, this one by Denis Alexander:

Andrew Williams, ‘Biblical Lament and Political Protest’, Cambridge Papers 23, 1 (March 2014).

Here is the summary:

‘This paper considers the pastoral and political role of biblical lament in the Christian life. The theology and practice of lament is often neglected in congregations, despite its prominence in the biblical text. Such neglect deprives churches of a pastoral resource and moreover, as this paper highlights, diminishes the church’s capacity for prophetic critique and political activism in the face of social injustice. This paper argues lament is needed in corporate worship and prayer, not only to give spiritual expression to faith wrestling with pain, but also to re-energise communities of believers to name injustice, recognise political agency and sustain prophetic action.’