General listing of posts and articles

Country: United States of AmericaGraduated from Bethel Seminary (m.div.) 2007. Married and living in Minneapolis. Member of The Salvage Yard Church. Bio:  Graduated from Bethel Seminary (m.div.) 2007. Married Living in Minneapolis. Member of The Salvage Yard Church. Currently employed, but looking for a better job. Pet projects:   Christianity 3.0 (mschellman.blogspot.com)...

We’ve always had others in our midst.  There is no One Way to respond to others—inside or outside our community.  Discerning how to respond to today’s Canaanites and learning how to live with today’s Rahabs and learning how to debate today‘s Stoics and learning how to rebuke and be rebuked by fellow believers, is part of the journey.  The Great Commission calls for a continual...

Country: United States of AmericaBio: http://www.jaygary.com...

An interview that I did with Darren King, mostly about The Coming of the Son of Man but also touching on the need for a narrative-realist biblical theology, has just been published at Precipice magazine. This is how Darren introduces the interview: One of the hallmarks of the Emerging Church is its desire, its commitment, to move beyond traditionalism, to examine various aspects of...

Traditional theology tends to honour the incomprehensible as if it were much to be preferred to that which is clear. Unless there is a mystery or a paradox involved, it is not true religion and we have been somehow short changed. ...

Country: Bosnia and HerzegovinaBio: I’m from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Few weeks ago I graduated from Theological Seminary in Brussels, where I was also involved in work with The Well. At this moment I’m in Bosnia starting my work with one missionarie couple from Finland, where at the same time I want to start a new kind or expression of church in the city of Banja Luka....

There are different views/ideas or beleifs on the theology of justification; It would be intresting learn the different ones: ...

Country: United KingdomI believe in …Bio:  For a bio I am just going to briefly quote something I wrote a while ago on the subject of creeds on another discussion site. Perhaps later I’ll come up with a real bio.  On Creeds   (Someone posted one of the early versions of the Apostles’ Creed and asked for comments.) D:   I am not...

What Do Names Do? Do They Reflect or Do They Evoke? The opening words of Martin Buber’s magnum opus, I and Thou, begin: “Basic words do not state something that might exist outside them; by being spoken they establish a mode of existence.” When Buber says that “Basic words do not state something that might exist outside them,” he is gesturing toward a fundamental divide between...

The interpretation of a recently discovered Jewish text by Israel Knohl, professor of Biblical Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has been causing moderate fluctuations in the media and blogosphere. Opinions are divided over whether the text, written in ink on a stone tablet, is authentic, legible, or the sort of thing that could ‘shake our basic view of Christianity’. In...

John Doyle has summarized his excellent set of studies of the ‘new creation’ motif in Paul. He claims to have embarked on this course at least partly as a self-defensive response to a piece I had written on the Canaanite ‘genocide’, so I hope a courteous rejoinder is not out of place. ...

Among present commentators, how is Jesus related to other figures of religious devotion like the Buddha or Muhammad or even New Agers? One popular response is to reduce the relationship between Jesus and, say, the Buddha, to one of Right versus Wrong. Let’s call this view the “many paths, one goal” model of thought. Usually, it turns out that Jesus is Right and the Buddha is Wrong. Ravi...

I began this series of posts about the old and new creations while coiled in a self-defensive posture. As a non-Christian, how do I respond to Andrew’s justification of the Yahwistic genocide recorded in Deuteronomy 7, a mass slaughter of Gentiles by Jews that harkens back to the Flood and foreshadows the Last Judgment? For Andrew this mass eradication of entire nations exemplified God’s...

It’s been said that Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians serves as a template for the letter to the Ephesians. Whether or not that’s the case, the passage on the "new man" in Colossians 3 closely parallels that in Ephesians 4, with some notable augmentations....

The following article — originally an appendix to my lengthy discourse, Open Source Community — discusses the innateness of the "longing to belong" and how this important urge within all of us is involved in our involvement with church…as ‘institution’ and as ‘community’. It examines some insights concerning the nature of institutions from a number...

Continuing the series of posts on the new creation begun here, here, and here, we move on to Paul’s reference to the "new man" in Ephesians 4. ...

Country: United States of AmericaAn amateur theologian, Mr. Silverthorne aligns with emergent theology simply because he is not Calvinist or Arminian, Wesleyan or Baptist, conservative or liberal. He was recently quoted as saying, “Taking the Bible at face value does not mean literal interpretation.”Bio: Jason Silverthorne escaped high school with a diploma, and has...

Country: United States of AmericaBio: welp. i blog at theologer.com that’s about all thats worth knowing. I wear pants 5 days a week....

People keep leaving the “church” to go to house churches (which may be more of the “church” than our buildings in warehouses with pastors wearing cutoff jeans and bleaching their hair to be relevant), and now I understand why. I’m hanging in there because I think the church can sort it out… but these are the five reasons I would cite to leave the church…....

In trying to understand the Biblical idea of the "new creation" we’ve looked at the only two Biblical passages that explicitly use the phrase: Galatians 6 and 2 Corinthians 5. Next we investigate the three passages which refer explicitly to the "new man," beginning with Ephesians 2:11-22. ...