J. Richard Middleton's Blog

I have had a wonderful and fulfilling full-time teaching career, which began some thirty years ago at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School and continued through my move to Roberts Wesleyan University and Northeastern Seminary. I formally retired from the Seminary in 2024 and have since focused on writing (though as Emeritus Professor I will still […]

This is the sixth (and final) installment of an article on the Kingdom of God. Part 1 began with Jesus’s proclamation at the start of his ministry about the kingdom of God. Part 2 looked at Jesus’s sermon at Nazareth, in which he explained the nature of the kingdom he was inaugurating. Part 3 shifted to the biblical […]

This is the fifth installment of an article on the Kingdom of God. Part 1 began with Jesus’s proclamation at the start of his ministry about the kingdom of God. Part 2 looked at Jesus’s sermon at Nazareth, in which he explained the nature of the kingdom he was inaugurating. Part 3 shifted to the biblical backstory of […]

I am currently doing a total rewrite of the book on a Christian worldview that Brian Walsh and I coauthored, called The Transforming Vision: Shaping a Christian World View (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1984). The book has found a wide audience in both English and other languages (especially Korean, where it has just about […]

This is the fourth installment of an article on the Kingdom of God. Part 1 began with Jesus’s proclamation at the start of his ministry about the kingdom of God. Part 2 looked at Jesus’s sermon at Nazareth, in which he explained the nature of the kingdom he was inaugurating. Part 3 shifted to the […]

This is part 3 of a series of posts on the kingdom of God. Part 1 can be found here. Part 2 can be found here. The kingdom of God in the teaching of Jesus is a distinctly Jewish idea, rooted in Israel’s Scriptures. To understand the significance of this kingdom we will need to […]

Many Christians have a narrow, truncated understanding of what God is up to in the world. Given the size of the shark, police chief Martin Brody said in Jaws, “You’re going to need a bigger boat.” So we today need the full scope of the biblical story from creation to consummation to address the crises […]

This Fall (beginning August 26, 2025), I will be teaching my signature course on the Biblical Worldview as a radical, liberating vision for the church and the world. The course has had a number of different names over the years; it is currently called “Biblical Worldview: Scripture, Theology, Ethics.” I’ve taught non-credit versions of this […]

I’ve been reflecting on the value of lament prayer ever since I went through a particularly dark time in my life many years ago. After not praying for some months, I found the lament psalms in the Bible as the door to hope, which opened me up to praying again. These psalms are also known […]

In my last post, I addressed the reversal of power dynamics in the kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed. But beyond that, what did Jesus mean by this term? The Nazareth Manifesto Here we are helped by Luke’s Gospel, which does not use the term “kingdom of God” in Jesus’s opening message. Along with Matthew […]