The following resources have expanded our discussion by drawing on a wealth of insightful pastors, scholars, and authors. Documents not linked to outside sources are appended as attachments at the bottom of the page.

Excerpts and Essays

Developing a Kaleidoscopic View of the Restoring Work of God in Christ. The excerpts from the following two books explain the need for a wide range of metaphors to help grasp the rich, multifaceted nature of the atonement. They can be found here. 

• Scot McKnight, A Community Called Atonement (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2007), xi
• Joel Green, “Kaleidoscopic View” in Beilby J and Eddy PR, eds, The Nature of the Atonement: Four Views (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2006), 166-169.

Discovering the Will of God. James Howell (PhD, Duke) is senior pastor of Myers Park United Methodist Church in Charlotte, North Carolina. 

Emerging Church. "Five Streams of the Emerging Church," by Scot McKnight, was published in Christianity Today, 2007. He writes: "As a theologian, I have studied the movement and interacted with its key leaders for years—even more, I happily consider myself part of this movement or 'conversation.' As an evangelical, I've had my concerns, but overall I think what emerging Christians bring to the table is vital for the overall health of the church. In this article, I want to undermine the urban legends and provide a more accurate description of the emerging movement."

God's Abundant Generosity. "The Liturgy of Abundance, The Myth of Scarcity." Walter Brueggemann (PhD, St. Louis University) is professor emeritus of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. The article (attached below) appeared in the Christian Century, March 24-31, 1999.

Gospel, by Scot McKnight. "The gospel is the story of the work of the triune God (Father, Son, and Spirit) to completely restore broken image-bearers (Gen. 1:26–27) in the context of the community of faith (Israel, Kingdom, and Church) through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the gift of the Pentecostal Spirit, to union with God and communion with others for the good of the world." Scot unpacks this description in an article entitled "The 8 Marks of a Robust Gospel" in Christianity Today, March 2008.

Holistic.Gospel: Integrating Proclamation with Performance. This excerpt by Chris Wright addresses how and why the whole church must bring the whole gospel as it serves to advance God's purposes in the world. Evangelism and social action are inextricably bound together as two expressions of God's will to make all things right. Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible's Grand Narrative (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), 316-323. Wright (PhD, Cambridge), former professor and dean of All Nations Christian College (England), is the Director of Langham Partnership’s International. More on Chris. The Mission of God was the winner of the 2007 Christianity Today Missions/Global Affairs Book of the Year.

Justification. This word in the NT served as a legal metaphor wherein the judge pronounced you as being acquitted, of being “in the right” (cf. the parable of the “justified” tax-collector in Luke 18:1-14). Paul uses the term in a covenantal way, that is, as referring to “the right community,” that is, the community that will be vindicated by resurrection when Jesus returns. The word can be used in the past tense, as in “we have been justified,” and in the future tense, as in “we await justification, or judgment, in the future.” Like many other NT realities it shares in the “already/not yet” dynamic that we have explored (for our discussion, see here). So the word has legal, covenantal, communitarian, and eschatological dimensions. For a fuller understanding of what Paul means by "justify," see an article by Tom Wright called "The Shape of Justification," Bible Review, April 2001.

Liberating the Prisoner-of-War. This excerpt compares three theological understandings to how God's grace works to liberate us from our waywardness. The three views discussed are the unbiblical ‘evangelical’, the deterministic calvinist, and the classical (or Wesleyan) arminian. This illustration was adapted with slight modification from Jerry Walls and Joseph Dongell, Why I am Not a Calvinist (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2004), pp. 67-70. Both authors are professors at Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, Kentucky.

Missional: What is It? See the description of a missional church here, taken from Dan Kimball, They Like Jesus but Not the Church: Insights from Emerging Generations (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007), 20.

For more on the biblical trajectory of mission emerging from the OT, see excerpts from Richard Bauckham, Bible and Mission: Christian Witness in a Postmodern World (Carlisle: Paternoster Press; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003).

Audio Sermons and Lectures

Rob Bell

Rob pastors at Mars Hills Bible Church, near Grand Rapids, MI.

Outward. This congregation has six shared values, which they call Directions. The fourth direction extends outwards. To download the mp3 sermons (for free!), link here for the first series, and here for the second, place them in your basket, and check out. 

New Exodus series, 2007. Here's the intro to the series. Each of the sermon outlines can be found at these links: Egypt / Sinai / Jerusalem / Babylon / Jesus / / What This Means Today This 4-part audio series here is available for free from the Mars Hills website.

Greg Boyd

Greg is pastor of Woodland Hills Church, St. Paul, Minnesota. More on Boyd can be found here.

Extravagent Forgiveness, Extravagent Love. A sermon on Luke 7:36-50. Here is the page of archived sermons from 2007. Scroll down to 6/24/2007 for the mp3 links. 

When we look at the fallen world around us, we often see division, separation, and seclusion. Whether it’s separation by family, country, ethnicity, religion, there is a tendency to sort ourselves into people groups by what we like or do not like. Though this may be natural in this world, it is completely opposite of what the Kingdom of God is about. Jesus came and demonstrated a radical willingness to associate with people of all walks of life with the love of God.

It's All About Love. These two sermons were delivered in April 2002, to address what life is all about: Loving God by loving others. Here is the page of archived sermons from 2002. Scroll down to 6/14/2002 and 6/21/2002 for the mp3 links.

Part 1. We were reminded that love is the power that validates any act of obedience or discipline that a Christian does. If we don’t have love, nothing else we do can have the impact God wants it to have. In establishing this truth, Greg discussed the goal of creation as the context through which God is able to express perfect love to us. We then acknowledge that love for us, reflect that love back to God and extend it to others. All three of these movements are interrelated and necessarily entail each other. God ascribes infinite worth to us, we ascribe infinite worth back to God and we ascribe infinite worth to each other. The Church is set apart for this task in the world so that the world will see, by the radical contrast the Church should have with the culture, that Christ is the true expression of God’s love for the world. Ultimately this will result in the uniting of all things in Christ. Just as Christ is united with the Father, so we too are united with God in Christ and it is this unity that we invite the world to participate in as we bring the Good News to all people.

Part 1: Sermon Power Point Slides. Sermon Study Notes.

Past 2. Greg began with a review of last week’s message about the goal of creation, a biblical definition of love, and the three movements that God’s love makes. We were reminded that love is the “deal breaker.” Recall the carnival analogy from the sermon of knocking over the right bear to win all the stuffed animals. If you knock over the bear, you get all the other animals as well. If you miss the bear, you don't win anything. If we love in a Christ-like manner, all the other ways we are to behave as Christians will naturally follow. Without love, we cannot do anything else that is pleasing to God.

Part 2: Sermon Power Point Slides. Sermon Study Notes.

How is it that we are "elected" in Christ? This sermon on Ephesians 1:3-4 is taken from Boyd's series through Ephesians delivered in 1994-1995. Here is the page of archived sermons from 1994. Scroll down to "6/26/1994 – Predestination: Good News or Bad?" for the mp3 links. 

Predestination has long been a confusing and controversial issue in Christian theology.  Some believe that all of our actions are the working out of a Divine blueprint for the world and that only certain individuals were predestined to be saved.  The theory (called Calvinism) raises many theological problems.  Why would a loving God create some people just to send them to hell?  How can God be considered all good if everything, including all that's evil, is a part of His plan for the world?  How can God get angry at our sin if He's the one who programmed us to do it in the first place?  Why would the Bible emphasize the need to evangelize all nations if some people will automaticly believe and others never will?  Why would God get so frustrated by our waywardness (as in Hosea) if it is just another part of His plan?

       

The Bible consistently portrays human beings as free moral agents, able to choose whether to do right or to do wrong, and able choose saving faith.

       

The biggest problem with Calvinism is that it rejects the idea of God as being the God of universal love.  Ezekiel 33:11, 2 Peter 3:9, and l John 2:1 tell us the opposite.

       

The lst-century Jewish mindset probably would have taken Ephesians 1:5 to refer to corporate election instead of individual predestination.

The Cross and the Sword

Arguing from Scripture and history, Dr. Boyd makes a compelling case that whenever the church gets too close to any political or national ideology, it is disastrous for the church and harmful to society. Dr. Boyd contends that the American Evangelical Church has allowed itself to be co-opted by the political right (and some by the political left) and exposes how this is harming the church’s unique calling to build the kingdom of God. In the course of his argument, Dr. Boyd challenges some of the most deeply held convictions of evangelical Christians in America – for example, that America is, or ever was, “a Christian nation” or that Christians ought to be trying to “take America back for God.”

Resources on this topic, including free mp3 sermons from the 2004 series, are available here from Woodland Hills Church, St. Paul, MN.

Michael Goheen

Mike Goheen (PhD, University of Utrecht) occupies the Geneva Chair of Reformational Worldview Studies at Trinity Western University, Langley, BC. A long-time pastor and worldwide lecturer, his areas of expertise are mission and western culture, worldview and education, gospel and culture, biblical theology and ecclesiology. Well published, Mike’s recent book The Drama of Scripture (described here) argues for a narrative approach to scripture as foundational to Christian thinking and living.

Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story

Video of two conference lectures given by Dr. Goheen, September 2006 (in Real Audio format): Lecture 1, Lecture 2

In lecture 2 Mike refers to "the Contemporary Testimony" from the Christian Reformed Church entitled "Our World Belongs to God"