@HaddenTurner @JubileeCentre 1/3 Just got a 2 Pet 3:7-12 text from my Bible Study teacher. Among evangelicals, the pivotal exegetical 'checkmate' equates "fire" with obliteration, evacuating New Creation from the biblical imagination—recasting it as earth-escape, not God's plan to judge, purify and renew it.
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13/ Perhaps that's the simplest way to say it. Apocalyptic theology is fourth-wall theology because it insists that the gospel is not a worldview but a new world—immanence itself reclaimed as the place where transcendence arrives—only as it is activated, embodied, and shared. 8/ What if the Kingdom isn't metaphor or otherworldly consolation relativizing claims to earthly power, but ontological fact—a fully habitable reality where personal agency and cosmic process converge, accessible by attuning to and participating in what already is, here and now? 14/ The gospel, in this register, is not first a religion at all. It is a new creation claim. The announcement is not "Here is a new religion." It is, “the world is being remade; transfer your allegiance.” And allegiance is not conceptual assent; it is embodied relocation. 18/ The result is recovery of an architecture of being where the body's intelligence, the material world's resistance, and the mind's understanding form a unified field of perception and liberating activity rebuilding the material foundations of sanity and culture.
Open original document@HaddenTurner @affinitytalks 12/ Any theology—or any religion—that can’t bind redemption to the conditions of creaturely life commits a foundational existential error: trying to rescue humans _from_ the world, instead of learning how the world (and our life within it) is what holds us to account.
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Alt-text excerpt from Plough Quarterly: Jesus Is Coming – Plant a Tree! In the new creation, the ancient human mandate to look after the garden is dramatically reaffirmed. By N. T. Wright This article first appeared in the Spring 2015 issue of Plough. … This doesn’t mean that we are called to build the kingdom by our own efforts, or even with the help of the Spirit. The final kingdom, when it comes, will be the free gift of God, a massive act of grace and new creation. But we are called to build for the kingdom. Like craftsmen working on a great cathedral, we have each been given instructions about the particular stone we are to spend our lives carving, without knowing or being able to guess where it will take its place within the grand design. We are assured, by the words of Paul and by Jesus’ resurrection as the launch of that new creation, that the work we do is not in vain. That says it all. That is the mandate we need for every act of justice and mercy, every program of ecology, every effort to reflect God’s wise stewardly image into his creation. In the new creation, the ancient human mandate to look after the garden is dramatically reaffirmed – another point we could draw out of John 20 were there time. The resurrection of Jesus is the reaffirmation of the goodness of creation, and the gift of the Spirit is there to make us the fully human beings we were supposed to be, precisely so that we can fulfill that mandate at last. What are we waiting for? Jesus is coming. Let’s go and plant those trees.
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