andygoodliff

British Baptist Biblical Scholars (6) R. Alistair Campbell

PhD (supervised by Graham Stanton / London, 1993)

Tutor in New Testament, Spurgeon's College (1989-2000)

Lecturer in Biblical Studies at the United Theological College of the West Indies in Jamaica (2003-2006)

Publications

'The Grounds of Association.' in David Slater (ed.) A Perspective on Baptist Identity (Mainstream, 1987), 7-14

'Essential Aspects of the Church in the Bible', Evangelical Review of Theology 3 (1989)

'Does Paul Acquiesce in Divisions at the Lord's Supper?', Novum Testamentum 33.1 (1991)

'Do the Work of an Evangelist', Evangelical Quarterly 64 (1992)

'The Elders of the Jerusalem Church', Journal of Theological Studies 44 (1993)

The Elders: Seniority within Earliest Christianity (T & T Clark, 1994)

'Identifying the Faithful Sayings in the Pastoral Epistles', Journal for the Study of the New Testament 16 (October 1994) 

'Κα μλιστα ο κεων–A New Look at 1 Timothy 5.8', New Testament Studies 41.1 (1995)

'Jesus and his Baptism', Tyndale Bulletin 47.2 (November 1996)

'Once More: Is Worship ‘Biblical’?', The Churchman 110.2 (1996)

'Against such things there is no law'? Galatians 5:23b again', Expository Times 107 (1996) 

'Baptism and Resurrection (1 Cor 15.29)', Australian Biblical Review 47 (1999), 43-52

'Dying with Christ: The Origins of a Metaphor?' in Stanley E. Porter and Anthony R. Cross (eds.), Baptism, the New Testament and the Church: Historical and Contemporary Studies in Honour of R. E. O. White (Sheffield Academic Press, 1999)

The Story We Live by: A Reader's Guide to the New Testament (Bible Reading Fellowship, 2004)

'Book Review: House Church and the Mission: The Importance of Household Structures in Early Christianity by Roger W. Gehring', Journal of Theological Studies 58.2 (2007), 666-671

'Triumph and delay: the interpretation of Revelation 19:11-20:10', Evangelical Quarterly (January 2008)

'New birth from Water and Spirit’ in Pieter J. Lalleman (ed.), Challenging to Change: Dialoguse with a Radical Baptist Theologian: Essays Presented to Nigel G. Wright on his sixtieth birthday (Spurgeon's College, 2009)

Born Again: What Did Jesus Mean? (Grove Books, 2013)

The Theological Doodlings of Kim Fabricius

Kim Fabricius' theological doodlings are joy to read and often very funny. You can read them all here, but here's a selection of the shortest, and four doodlings on Douglas Campbell's The Deliverance of God.

 

If there were cameras at Calvary, Christianity would be a cliché.

Sermons are like basketball games: everything is won or lost in the last five minutes.

Jesus said, “Where two are three are gathered together in my name, there is the C of E in 50 years.”

To all ministers troubled by a sense of failure – and your point is?

What is heaven like? A lot like jail: no rich people.

People often talk of church planting when they mean church cloning.

The best sermon I’ve ever preached is probably the worst sermon they’ve ever heard.

So you’re a minister. Do you have an office? If you do, you’re not a minister. A CEO has an office, a minister has a study.

A woman once asked me why I never preach on taking Jesus as your personal Lord and Saviour. “Because, ma’am, I preach on the Bible.”

Any preacher who brandishes a book and declares “God says …!” can only be waving the Qur’an, not the Bible.

Sermons are like apples. They come in sharp and sweet, crisp and soft, dry and juicy, and they ripen at different times of the year. And no one likes the core.

The difference between a Barth and a Piper is that the former glorifies God, the latter deifies Glory.

For some complementarians, it’s wasn’t Adam and Eve, it was Adam and Jeeves.

A Methodist friend of mine asked me if I would help him with a talk he was preparing on Arminianism. I said, “Only if it’s a eulogy.”

For a quintessential oxymoron, “successful church” ranks right up there with “smartphone”.

God invented the church to give atheists a fighting chance.

Contemporary translation of Mark 14:26b: “On the way, Jesus paused to check his Facebook page. It said: ‘You have 0 friends’.”

“Cognitive Therapy”?  You mean “preaching”? 

Creationists do not disbelieve in science. On the contrary, creationists believe only in science – crap science.

A proposal for the translation of ekklesia: “kindergarten”.

Prosperity Gospel Jesus: “I am the Alpha and the Romeo.”

 

Finally finishing Douglas Campbell’s massive The Deliverance of God is rather like completing a marathon: you’re deliriously glad you did it – and fucking relieved it’s over.

Douglas Campbell’s The Deliverance of God is a Pauline game-changer.  There are only three excuses for not reading it: (1) you have underdeveloped biceps (as you will be unable to elevate the book to make ocular contact); (2) you have manual osteoarthritis (as you will be unable to flip from the text to the endnotes without risk of irreversible damage to the articular cartilage); (3) you have less than six months to live.

If Paul didn’t say what Douglas Campbell says he said, one hopes that the apostle would have the good grace to stand corrected.

I just woke up. I’d been dreaming I was re-reading Douglas Campbell’s The Deliverance of God. It was the best year’s sleep I’ve ever had. In an interview, Campbell now admits that his book “is possibly a little too long.” No worries: Paul, on reflection, said the same thing about his letter to the Romans: “In the future, Tertius, remind me: postcards only.”

The Theological Tweets of Lincoln Harvey

Here's some of the best theological tweets from @LincolnHarvey (Lecturer in Systematic Theology at St Mellitus College and author of A Brief Theology of Sport):

 

So you want to know where the Babylonians came from? Well, when Mummylonian and Daddylonian love each other very much...

Churches without steeples are pointless.

The Son of God is very down to earth.

Jesus had a row with his disciples. On the Sea of Galilee.

 Jesus is hung up on us.

Jesus died doing what he loved, being human.

The church is both proleptic and amateurleptic.

The bible is wholly ghostwritten.

The rich want to call him J€$u$.

We took a risk killing God, but he made a boulder move.

The doctrine of original sin means the word 'mankind' is an oxymoron.

Christians are not what they used to be.

Long term forecast. God reigns. Son shines.

God always slips from our grasp, even when we grabbed a hammer and nailed him down.

On Myers-Briggs, Jesus is an INRI.

I've just been read by my bible.

There is a place for lyres in truthful worship.

Eucharist: the original Happy Meal™

The Eucharist is a remembrance of our future.

Reminder. It's not a youcharist.

The atonement is a crossWord puzzle.

God meets us on the road we took to avoid him.

PENTECOST: The church is an eschatological flashmob.

Fundamentalism. Throwing the maybe out with the bathwater.

What do we want? THE KINGDOM OF GOD! When do we want it? NOW AND NOT YET!

Remembering Baptists: Benjamin Keach

Today (18 July) is a day to remember the life of the Particular Baptist theologian and pastor Benjamin Keach.

Keach was the leading theological thinker of the late 17th Century among the Particular Baptists. Author of numerous works and pastor of a congregation in Horsleydown, Southwark.

Born on the 29 Feb 1640. He became a General Baptist in his teens. He was arrested, imprisoned, tried, fined, and his works burnt in 1660 and 1664. Following which he moved to London and moved from the General Baptists to the Particular Baptists, probably through the influence of his second wife Susannah and his friendship with Hanserd Knollys.

He argued with the likes of Richard Baxter against infant baptism and authored catechisms and confessions as well as allegorical works in a similar vein to John Bunyan. He argued for the laying on hands following baptism, which at time the Particular Baptists were unconvinced by and more famously he argued for the use of hymns in worship. When his church in Horsleydown voted to sing a hymn following the sermon, some have said we are the beginnings of the great tradition of English Protestant hymnody.

For more on the life of Benjamin Keach see:

Jonathan Arnold, The Reformed Theology of Benjamin Keach (Centre for Baptist History & Heritage; Regent's Park College, 2013)

D. B. Riker, A Catholic Reformed Theologian: Federalism and Baptism in the Thought of Benjamin Keach (Studies in Baptist History & Thought; Paternoster, 2009)

James B. Vaughan, 'Benjamin Keach' in Timothy George & David Dockery (eds.), Baptist Theologians (Broadman, 1990) 

 

Brian Brock, Captive to Christ, Open to the World: On Doing Christian Ethics in Public

Brian Brock teaches Christian ethics at Aberdeen. He is the author of Singing the Ethos of God: The Place of Christian Ethics in Scripture (Eerdmans, 2007) and Christian Ethics in a Technological Age (Eerdmans, 2010). He has also written in the area of disability theology, most recently editing Disability in the Christian Tradition: A Reader (2012) with his colleague John Swinton. Captive to Christ, Open to the World is a little book, 140pp and is a series of interviews with Brock over a range of ethical questions with concern for the environment, politics, medicine, the university. The interviews begin with discussions of Brock's work on scripture and technology, before broadening out into wider issues. The interviews have been edited by Kenneth Oakes who provides an introduction. 

The book offers an insight into the task of being a Christian ethicist in the church, but also in a secular institution. The book is difficult to summarise because its mode of interview means the conversation moves in different directions, but there is, on almost every page, a gem of an observation or thought to ponder, which is rooted in day to day living. What Brock does in this book is engage with concrete issues of policy and practice in conversation with the Christian tradition, Augustine, Luther, Barth and Bonhoeffer being the key thinkers. By concrete I mean if this book had an index you would find references to Obama, Donald Trump, Robert Murdoch, Burger King, the Iona Community, James Hunter, Stanley Hauerwas, Jean Vanier, amongst others. This is no abstract treatment of ethics, but is rooted in his experience of being a parent of child with a disability, of living and working in Aberdeen, of being an academic within a university.

One thing Brock seeks to explore is how the church cannot simply be a contrast society (p.39). He is critical of this stance. For Brock there is much more tension in our how the church is located and participates in the world. He also wants to be much more real in acknowledging that the church 'doesn't really contrast much at all' (p.79). Brock offers a less adversarial view of the world, and more humble view of the church, arguing for the importance of listening over judging. 

This is an exciting little book, which demonstrates the role the Christian ethicist can play, both in the church and in the wider public. Brock is concerned to see his students and the church to think through arguments Christianly, that is, to show how and why theology matters. Its interview style allows us to see a little of how Brock thinks. Where monographs are the norm, there is perhaps space for this kind of book. Brock bigger books are not easy-reads and so Captive to Christ is also welcome in helping translate his arguments there in a more accessible manner. Time will tell whether Brock becomes the next Hauerwas (both are bald white men from Texas), but regardless Brock's contributions will be worth paying attention to.

The 1640 group

The 1640 group are 9 Baptists churches that celebrate their 375th anniversary since they were founded in 1640. These are some of the earliest Baptist churches. Together these churches are gathering in Bristol at Broadmead for a shared anniversary service on the 19th September. 

The 9 are:

Broadmead Baptist Church, Bristol - read about Broadmead here

Newbury Baptist Church, Berkshire

Abbey Road Baptist Church, Reading

Dagnell Street Baptist Church, St Albans

Kings Stanley Baptist Church, Gloucestershire

Alcester Baptist Church, Warwickshire

Berkhamstead Baptist Church, Hertfordshire

Kingsbridge Baptist Church, Devon

Castle Hill Baptist Church, Warwick - read about the church here