Evangelical Review of Theology 44, 4 (October 2020)

The latest Evangelical Review of Theology, published by The World Evangelical Alliance, is now online and available in its entirety as a pdf here.

Editor’s Introduction:

Is Our Quality Higher Than That of the US Presidential Campaign?

Efraim Tendero

Evangelicals and Elections

Thomas K. Johnson

The Protester, the Dissident and the Christian

When and why should Christians protest? How can we turn the hearts of other protesters towards the hope offered by the Christian gospel? This article, revised from a sermon originally preached during the Arab Spring uprisings, answers those timely questions as we experience another year of widespread protests.

Ebenezer Yaw Blasu

The Invisible Global War: An African ‘Theocological’ Assessment of Responses to COVID-19

How should the experience of COVID-19 shape future human behaviour? This article examines responses by both Christians and practitioners of primal (traditional) African religions, from a perspective that combines theology and ecology. Drawing on scientific and spiritual principles, it argues that COVID-19 may be calling us to avoid forms of resource exploitation that disturb the sensitive balance between human activity and nature.

Andrea L. Robinson

Reflecting the Image of God through Speech: Genesis 1–3 in James 3:1–12

This article shows how James 3:1–12 echoes the creation account, using imagery from Genesis 1–3 to correlate purity of speech with bearing the image of God. Accordingly, the untamed tongue is regarded as a central characteristic of fallenness and a distortion of God’s image – emphasizing that our failure to tame the tongue separates individuals from God, creates division in the community of faith, and has a severely destructive impact on the world. Applications and a sample sermon outline are provided.

C. Ryan Fields

Evangelical Engagement with Barth: A Modest Proposal

Karl Barth, one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century, is too important for evangelicals to ignore but not easy to evaluate. Barth reacted against liberalizing tendencies with a strong emphasis on the centrality of Christ and the power of Scripture, but his theology also contained some innovations that deviate from evangelical tradition. This article surveys evaluations of Barth by English-speaking evangelicals and offers well-informed suggestions on how to appropriate Barth’s work.

Jana Holiday and Linda Cannell with James D. McLennan

The Puzzle of Institutional Inertia in Theological Education

Theological institutions must sustain their core values while not resisting necessary change. The authors draw on their extensive experience in theological education and board governance to address how four groups of stakeholders– administrators, faculty, students and boards – can resist institutional inertia.

Chris Gousmett

What Are the ‘Gates of Hades’ in Matthew 16:18?

Matthew 16:18 contains one of Jesus’ most obscure remarks, as he assures Peter (and us) that the ‘gates of Hades’ will not overcome the church. But gates are stationary objects that don’t normally overcome anything. What was Jesus promising? This article shows the weakness of prevailing interpretations and argues for an expansive metaphorical alternative.

Thomas Schirrmacher

Observations on Apologetics and Its Relation to Contemporary Christian Mission

Christians often think of apologetics as something that only academics do, but actually it has been an essential part of Christian mission ever since the book of Acts. This article offers penetrating reflections on the meaning of apologetics today and how all Christians should equip themselves to do it.

Elmer Thiessen

The Reconstruction of Evangelism by Liberal Protestants: An Evangelical Response

Many voices – both secular and religious – argue that it is inappropriate in a religiously pluralistic world for evangelicals to call all people to repentance and faith in Christ. This article, by a leading evangelical expert on the ethics of evangelism, uses a recently published book critical of traditional evangelism as a starting point to explore how evangelicals should respond to such objections.

Book Reviews

Nigel Walter on Reimagining Church Buildings

A recent Cambridge Paper from the Jubilee Centre is available online here (from where a pdf can be downloaded), this one by Nigel Walter:

Nigel Walter, ‘Reimagining Church Buildings: The Incarnation, Embodiment and Material Culture’, Cambridge Papers 29, 2 (June 2020).

Here is the summary:

‘As Christians, our approach to church buildings speaks volumes about our engagement with the world and those around us. Modern technology increasingly seeks to transcend place, but this sits uncomfortably with the scandalous particularity of the incarnation. Our God so loved the world – materiality and all – that he lived with and died for us at a particular time and place, literally “putting a stake into the ground”. This paper argues that, while the veneration of place does carry dangers, people and place are intimately and necessarily intertwined. Reflecting theologically on placedness frees us to see places in general, and buildings in particular, more in terms of opportunity than of irrelevance or threat.’

In Exile with Ezekiel #4: God’s Unwavering Plan

I wrote this week’s ‘Word for the Week’, a weekly email service provided by the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity.

The man brought me back to the entrance to the temple, and I saw water coming out from under the threshold of the temple towards the east […]  Then he led me back to the bank of the river. When I arrived there, I saw a great number of trees on each side of the river… Fruit trees of all kinds will grow on both banks of the river. Their leaves will not wither, nor will their fruit fail. Every month they will bear fruit, because the water from the sanctuary flows to them. Their fruit will serve for food and their leaves for healing.

Ezekiel 47:1, 6-7, 12

As Christians, we affirm that ‘we believe in the resurrection of the body’. Even so, there’s an all-too-common tendency to imagine that heaven is somewhere ‘up there’ above the sky, which is where our disembodied souls will go when we die, leaving the world behind. But the biblical picture, as we see in Ezekiel’s final vision and elsewhere in Scripture, is that God remains committed to the earth and will one day renew it.

So it is that in words and images that echo the garden of Eden and which John will later pick up in Revelation, Ezekiel is allowed to glimpse the goal of God’s restoring work – and it is nothing less than a new creation.

Ezekiel sees a stream of water flowing from the temple. Though it starts as a trickle, it deepens and widens as it flows. As it flows, it generates life – in formerly dead seas swarming with fish, in trees which never stop bearing fruit, whose leaves bring healing. And all because of the one who now dwells in the temple.

In short, the God who breathes new life into his people will also transform creation itself.

This vision of God’s unwavering purpose is perhaps what exiles need most. In keeping with how the Bible describes our hope, it not only provides a way of seeing the future, but of living in the present. For, if this is the final destination of the biblical story, it is also the direction in which that story is moving.

It is the assurance of God’s transforming presence that allows us to envision a new reality in our relationship God, with each other, and in the world. To be sure, we don’t bring in this new order. But nor do we wait passively for it to arrive, and its certainty allows us to lean into it now where we are able to do so. That hope frees us up to live expectantly and confidently, though realistically, in ways that seek to transform the here and now in line with what will be – not as an act of self-assertion, but as a response to God’s gracious promise.

The Christian hope of a new heaven and earth provides a source of motivation for how we live in the light of his presence now – doing all things for the glory of the God who will one day make all things new.

Anvil 36, 1 (2020) on Autoethnography

The origins of this particular issue of Anvil, now housed with CMS (Church Mission Society), lie in an MA class in Anthropology and Christian Mission with most of the contributions written by present and former students on CMS’s MA in Theology, Ministry and Mission.

In the Editorial, Colin Smith notes:

‘Perhaps the greatest challenge in producing an issue of Anvil dedicated to autoethnography is to persuade the reader to progress beyond the title. […]  Autoethnography takes us beyond the distinctions between observer and observed, highlighting the importance of our own experience, the stories of our lives, in providing a valid and authentic place from which to explore culture and identity and, as we shall see, offering a rich source for theological reflection.’

Individual contributions can be read from here, and the entire issue can be downloaded as a pdf here.

Mission Frontiers 42, 5 (September-October 2020)

The September-October 2020 issue of Mission Frontiers, published by the U.S. Center for World Mission, contains a number of articles on the theme of ‘Hunting the Movement Killers’.

According to the blurb:

‘Fostering growing movements is not just about doing all the right things, but also stopping all the things we do that kill movements. This issue of Mission Frontiers is all about how to hunt down and destroy every mission practice that kills movements, no matter how fond we are of them. These deadly mission “viruses” stand in the way of achieving our goal of growing movements to Christ in every people and place. A key take-away… is that most mission strategies focus on adding new people while growing movements focus on methods that multiply disciples – and multiplication sees far more rapid results than addition.’

The issue is available here, from where individual articles can be downloaded, and the entire issue can be downloaded as a pdf here.

In Exile with Ezekiel #3: God’s Restoring Power

I wrote this week’s ‘Word for the Week’, a weekly email service provided by the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity.

I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.

Ezekiel 36:25-27

It would be all too easy to blame our lack of missional success as God’s people on the fact that we are a disenfranchised minority. Or perhaps, we might think, it’s down to the apathy and stubbornness of people in society.

Ezekiel knows the real reason often lies elsewhere, and it’s altogether more sobering.

It’s clear as we read the Old Testament prophets that the biggest obstacle to God’s people making good on their call to be a light to the nations was not primarily persecution or resistance but their own failure to follow God’s ways. The greatest threat to mission was the worship of other gods.

Called to live among the nations, Israel was to walk in the ways of the Lord and reflect his character to the world in their daily lives. That they had not done so means, as God tells Ezekiel, that ‘wherever they went among the nations they profaned my holy name’ (36:20). At stake is the reputation of God’s name, and his desire for it to be known in all the earth.

For Ezekiel, and for us, God’s promises of restoration come at the point of deepest loss. And at the heart of those promises is the renewal of the people themselves, which God will bring about as he pledges to cleanse them and give them a new heart and a new spirit.

Reinforced by his vision of dry bones raised to life, Ezekiel sees that this renewing work will come about through the Spirit, who will enable God’s covenant people to walk in his ways. In an action reminiscent of God forming Adam from the ground and then breathing into his nostrils the breath of life (Genesis 2:7), God restores his people to their original design – a new humanity, no less.

That hope expressed in Ezekiel speaks of a larger, deeper restoration which would come about through Jesus, whose death, resurrection, and gift of the Spirit continue to animate God’s people today.

So it is that God’s promise through Ezekiel opens up to include us, who carry forward the same mission to represent God to the nations. For us, too, it is the permanent, transformative presence of the Holy Spirit who empowers us to live out our calling as witnesses to who he is and to what he has done, as we point others to Ezekiel’s God and ours.

Theology and Ministry: An Online Journal

I blogged about this years ago, but it’s just come to my attention again. Theology and Ministry is an open-access journal, a publication of Cranmer Hall, St John’s College, Durham.

According to its website blurb, it’s ‘a peer-reviewed annual publication featuring innovative work at the interface of theological study and ministerial practice and reflection’, which ‘publishes original research articles and book reviews by both established and emerging scholars and practitioners’.

The latest issue is available from here.