More on Tom Wright’s view of justification …

Paul Helm is starting a series of posts on Wright. Expect plenty of insight with a dash of verve and wit.

The first post criticises Wright’s understanding of the Reformed position. He thinks Wright’s covenantal approach is more akin to Reformed theology than Wright realises and also that Wright operates with a characiture of the Reformed view of imputation. But Helm also believes the gap between Wright and the traditional Reformed approach is narrowing and can be narrowed still further.

If you’re looking for an affordable alternative to residential Bible college that integrates training with work and ministry then the Northern Training Institute could be for you. NTI trains people for church leadership through:

• guided reading and short assignments
• two week-long residentials each year
• seven seminar days

The residentials and guided reading allow us to cover the ground with a focus on biblical, missional and pastoral implications rather than academic debates. But the real genius of NTI are the monthly seminar days. Each seminar day we take a theme for the day and students prepare papers on that theme – some looking at biblical issues, others coming from an historical or systematic perspective, and others looking at the missional and pastoral implications. It means that through the day we really wrestle with the topic while all the time students are learning to think theologically and apply theology to practice.

Because students can combine NTI with ministry and work, NTI is much more affordable that residential alternatives. But it also means the interplay between theology and practice happens naturally.

I think it’s great, but then I’m the Director! So here’s what current students say:

If I’d set out to design a training programme ideally suited for me it would be NTI.

The monthly seminar days have been invaluable to my learning and applying learning to my context. I have very much enjoyed leanring alongside fellow practitioners. NTI is great!

I’d recommend NTI to anyone.

NTI could be for you if …

• you want to be a church leader or a church planter
• you want affordable theological training while remaining in ministry or work
• you can commit 10-15 hours each week to study
• you’re a graduate or have experience of Christian ministry
• you have the support of your local church
• you’re based in the UK

For more information go to www.northerntraininginstitute.org.

Christianity Today have published online a table from their June 2009 edition by Trevin Wax that summarises the debate over the new perspective on Paul and justification. Following their recent books interacting with each other’s ideas, John Piper and Tom Wright represent the two sides of the discussion. Here are the books in question …

John Piper, The Future of Justification

Tom Wright, Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision

See also Tom Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said, especially chapter 7

For my own take on the topic see my article ‘Justification, Ecclesiology and the New Perspective’ which was published in Themelios and which is available online here.

More for the latest edition of LICC’s magazine EG …

Mark Greene tells the story of a church who started talking about everyone’s ‘frontline’. ‘Everyone had a frontline – a place, a context where they felt that God was calling them to minister, so everyone could be involved.’ The church leader, Paul Pease, says:

A saying we frequently use here at Hook is ’surviving and thriving on the frontline (and the frontline is where we are most of the time).’ We are still totally convinced that the action is on our frontline, and we retreat twice a week behind the frontline for fellowship so as to encourage one another to get back out to the frontline once again to win people for Christ. I am really passionate about this and am convinced this is the purpose of the church and the best way to reach people with the glorious gospel.

Mark Greene comments: “The team here at LICC now uses the word ‘frontline’ in all our teaching on mission. It’s a term that honours every context and binds people together in shared endeavour, even if that endeavour is pursued in different places.”

The latest edition of LICC’s magazine EG is available to download from their website. It includes the results of a survey of UK Christians. Asked what issues have affected your personal spiritual life, the top two responses were fatigue (55%) and time pressures (also 55%).

Reading the Bible, prayer, guidance, witnessing, conflict, ethical issues all came after those two top issues. It reinforces the reason why I wrote The Busy Christians’s Guide to Busyness . In The Busy Christian I said:

Our Christian lives can be full of good intentions to do more for God, but time and again those good intentions are sapped by the pace of our lives. Sermons, conferences, talks, books all urge us to spend more time praying, studying the Bible, sharing the gospel, building community, caring for the needy, campaigning for justice – and on it goes. But most Christians feel their lives are already over-full. Some Christians, because of ill-health or unemployment, struggle with the opposite problem. They wish they had more to do. But everywhere you look in the church today there are busy Christians …  There are many challenges facing the church today. But alongside all of them is this problem of time and busyness. Whatever new ideas we come up with for church or mission, we need to find the time to do them! In his book, The Tyranny of Time, Robert Banks (1983) says: ‘Our attitude to time is not an extra commitment or idea. It is the medium in which everything else is done. It affects everything.’ There’s so much we want to do; so many issues; so many opportunities. But so little time. We could argue about what the most crucial concerns are facing Christians today. But unless we sort out a Christian view of busyness, we might not find time to debate them, let alone do anything.

In the same survey people were asked which context they found most challenging. The top response was the workplace (43%) followed by their neighbourhood (34%).

Here’s the audio of an interview I gave with Phil Walker of TransWorld Radio about my books You Can Change, The Busy Christian’s Guide to Busyness and Total Church.

I recently received my author copies of a new book entitled Transforming the World? The Gospel and Social Responsibility (Apollos) edited by Jamie Grant and my good friend Dewi Hughes. (I know, it’s the same title as the book by David Smith I recently reviewed; even down to the question mark – I did point this out to them.)

It’s a collection of academic papers on Christian social involvement. My chapter on is on eschatology and social involvement: ‘Eschatology and the Transformation of the World: Contradiction, Continuity, Conflation and the Endurance of Hope.’ In some ways it’s a summary version of my book Mission and the Coming of God. Anyway, here’s the line up …

Introduction – Jamie A. Grant and Dewi A. Hughes

1. Protecting the vulnerable: the law and social care – David L. Baker

2. Failing the vulnerable: the prophets and social care – M. Daniel Carroll R.

3. ‘Why bother with the vulnerable?’ The wisdom of social care – Jamie A. Grant

4. Biblical paradigms of redemption: exodus, jubilee and the cross – Christopher J. H. Wright

5. The compassion of the Christ – Alistair I. Wilson

6. Luke’s ‘social’ gospel: the social theology of Luke-Acts – I. Howard Marshall

7. Theology in action: Paul and Christian social care – Jason Hood

8. The Servant solution: the coordination of evangelism and social action – Melvin Tinker

9. Understanding and overcoming poverty – Dewi A. Hughes

10. The biblical basis for social ethics – C. Rene Padilla

11. Public execution: the atonement and world transformation – Anna Robbins

12. Eschatology and the transformation of the world: contradiction, continuity, conflation and endurance of hope – Tim Chester

13. Evangelicals and society: the story of an on-off relationship – David W. Smith

14. An appeal to moral imagination and commercial acumen: transforming business as a solution to poverty – Peter S. Heslam

And here’s the blurb …

Evangelical Christianity has long been plagued by a dichotomy between evangelism and social action. The debate about whether evangelicals should attempt to make this world a better place in tune with God’s will as well as prepare people for life in a better world is the background to this stimulating volume, which seeks to demonstrate that there is no tension between the task of evangelism and the Christian’s obligation to care for those in need. The issue should never have been one of ‘either/or’ but rather should always have been voiced in terms of ‘both/and’. The Bible’s teaching makes it plain that God’s salvific work is both spiritual and physical.

The first seven chapters survey relevant material in the Old and New Testaments; the second seven explore the theme of world transformation from the perspective of social ethics, systematic theology and church history. The clear message is that the proclamation of God’s salvation must address both the desperate spiritual need of a sinful humanity and the desperate physical need that is all too apparent in our troubled world – and that there is theoretical and practical work yet to be done as we think and work under the dominion of Jesus, who as a result of his death and resurrection has been given all authority in heaven and earth.

This is great …

If you want more of this then take a look at John Piper’s excellent book, Don’t Waste Your Life .

I loved Gilead , the novel by Marilynne Robinson. Robinson wrote her first novel, Housekeeping
, in 1980. It became a huge hit and was made into a film by Bill Forsyth. Yet it was 24 years before she published a second novel, Gilead. It won the Pulitzer Prize. Four years on and her third novel, Home , has just won the Orange Prize. Not a bad record!

Andrew Brown of The Guardian has a very interesting post on an interview with Robinson in which she talks about how the thought of Calvin has shaped her writing. Here’s a quote:

“One of the things that has really struck me, reading Calvin,” she said then, “is what a strong sense he has that the aesthetic is the signature of the divine. If someone in some sense lives a life that we can perceive as beautiful in its own way, that is something that suggests grace, even if by a strict moral standard … they might seem to fail.”

Now this is just about the opposite of the kind of rule-bound and wholly unforgiving religion which most people associate with Calvinism, but in her mind it was linked with predestination, in a most unexpected way. Because predestination implies God’s untramelled freedom, he can choose to save those whom the world and its rules – even the church with its rules – might condemn. The prodigal in these two books, Jack Boughton, has done some very terrible things, and all through the book goes on hurting everyone who loves him. Yet it is almost impossible not to suffer with him.

Here’s the interview with Marilynne Robinson in last Saturday’s Guardian and click here for an interview  Claire Armitstead interview Marilynne Robinson about Home …

Steve Timmis recently did a series of posts on Twitter on ‘living ordinary life with gospel intentionality’ (see Total Church, 60-62 and 63-66 ). Here they are gathered together …

• Living ordinary life with gospel intentionality means … buying from local shops.
• Living ordinary life with gospel intentionality means … frequenting a local coffee shop or pub.
• Living ordinary life with gospel intentionality means … playing for a local sports team.
• Living ordinary life with gospel intentionality means … always tipping generously in local restaurants.
• Living ordinary life with gospel intentionality means … being the kind of neighbour everyone wants to have as a neighbour.
• Living ordinary life with gospel intentionality means … volunteering at a local charity shop along with a couple of others from church.
• Living ordinary life with gospel intentionality means … doing ordinary things in community.
• Living ordinary life with gospel intentionality means … opening your home to, and sharing your food with others.
• Living ordinary life with gospel intentionality means … walking the same route to work at the same time or catching the same train each day.
• Living ordinary life with gospel intentionality means … we do EVERYTHING for the sake of the gospel!

And here’s Steve’s twitter page.