Richard Bauckham is about to release his tome on Christology, "Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament's Christology of Divine Identity".
It looks like it will be an expansion on God Crucified, a short book on Jesus' divine identity that rocked my world a few years back. It really is one of the best short books around.
Just about anything by Bauckham is worth a look, but he seems to have a knack with short books that hit the nail on the head.
I highly recommend " Bible and Mission: Christian witness in a post modern world".
In 112 pages, Bauckham gives an excellent biblical theology of mission, and then, get this, and then he bothers relating that to our current globalized context. Fantastic! One gets the impression that the area of the world most in need of truthful witness and mission is the affluent West.
On 1 Corinthians 1:26-29
"At Corinth- and Paul certainly does not mean only at Corinth- God singled out the poor and the powerless, choosing to begin his work with them, not because God's love does not extend to the cultural and social elite, but actually for the sake of the wealthy and the powerful as well as for the poor and the humble. God's love has to reach the strong via the weak, because the strong can receive the love of God only by abandoning their pretensions to status above others" pp50
If this is the case, perhaps a church plant to reach the business people of Sydney CBD should be started by the homeless of the CBD.
We should view the poor, useless, untrained, unteachable and ungifted in our churches as our greatest evangelistic asset.
Where would I be without Bob Goudzwaard?
1 day ago
1 comment:
That would be an interesting experiment. As long as you don't go shooing the poor out of the good seats when the rich turn up (James 2:3).
It seems to me the Bible follows the same pattern. when worship matures, God glorifies it with material blessings. If this civilised worship becomes corrupted, compromised, He begins again - outside the city, in the wilderness - with a poor man, living rough and half naked, dressed in animal skins like Adam (Genesis 3:21), Elijah, John, and of course, our Lord Himself, who died naked outside the city to clothe us.
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