In this, the fifth and final, part of my lecture “It’s the End of the World as We Know It”: Paul, the Kingdom, and Living between the Times, I discuss the contagious faithfulness of Jesus which, as it is transmitted by the Holy Spirit, calls into existence a community of resistance to the regime of Sin and Death. This section contains some of the most obvious connections to the conference keynote addresses by David Fitch and his new book Faithful Presence. (more…)
Tag: kingdom
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“It’s the End of the World as We Know It”: Audio Series (Part 4)
In Part 4 of my lecture “It’s the End of the World as We Know It”: Paul, the Kingdom, and Living between the Times, I continue to explore the plight of humanity in bondage. Standing behind the fallen principalities and powers are the cosmic slaveholders Sin and Death. Under the reign of Sin and Death, the powers often compete with one another seeking to enlist human beings and demanding that they sacrifice themselves and one another for the sake of ensuring the survival of the principality. Human beings are taken in by the various deceptive tactics of the powers and find themselves developing a type of perverse love or allegiance for the very forces that seek to hold them in bondage. For human beings in such a predicament, help can only come into the system from above. (more…)
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“It’s the End of the World as We Know It”: Audio Series (Part 3)
In the previous section of my lecture, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It”: Paul, the Kingdom, and Living between the Times, I argued that the Gospel is the story of the God of Israel who is on mission to save the world that he has created and that he loves. This is apparent in Galatians 4:4-5, where Paul writes, “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children” (NRSV). This motif of a redemptive mission or liberating invasion suggests that humanity is, in some sense, in captivity. (more…)
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“It’s the End of the World as We Know It”: Audio Series (Part 2)
Below you’ll find the audio for the second part of my presentation – “It’s the End of the World as We Know It”: Paul, the Kingdom and Living between the Times – from the Kingdom Come conference held at Bayview Glen Alliance Church this past weekend. Having discussed the riddle of the apparent absence of the kingdom in Paul’s writings in the first part of the talk, in this section of the presentation I begin to consider the eschatological outlook at the heart of Paul’s theology. (more…)
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“It’s the End of the World as We Know It”: Audio Series (Part 1)
I had the privilege of participating this past weekend in a conference entitled, “Kingdom Come: Awakening to a Gospel-centred Life” at Bayview Glen Alliance Church in Toronto. Seeing so many people of varying ages and from all walks of life who were willing to give up a significant part of their weekend to reflect more seriously on what it means to live as God’s people today was itself a wonderful expression of the reality of the Kingdom. Noted pastor, theologian and author David Fitch challenged us over the course of three presentations to reflect more deeply on the questions: “What is the Gospel?” “When is the Kingdom?” and “How does the Kingdom Come?” (more…)
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Faithful Presence: Hunter, Fitch and Being Church
In his significant, ironically entitled work, To Change the World, James Davison Hunter offers the following diagnosis of the current cultural moment in which the church finds itself in the United States:
“The problem for Christians—to restate the broader issue once more—is not that their faith is weak or inadequate. In contemporary America, Christians have faith in God and, by and large, they believe and hold fast to the central truths of the Christian tradition. But while they have faith, they have also been formed by the larger post-Christian culture, a culture whose habits of life less and less resemble anything like the vision of human flourishing provided by the life of Christ and witness of scripture. The problem, in other words, is that Christians have not been formed ‘in all wisdom’ that they might rise to the demands of faithfulness in such a time as ours, ‘bearing fruit in every good work.’”[1. James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, & Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 227.] (more…)
