Michael C Champlin

“We need to become even more biblical than that, allowing Scripture to trump our inherited ideologies even when we’ve invested so much of our hearts in those systems. Dare we let Scripture say what it says without reinterpreting what it “really means” into the margins of our Study Bibles?”
― Bradley Jersak, Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hope, Hell, and the New Jerusalem

“An unexamined, status-quo Christianity is not worth perpetuating. I cannot and will not stay Christian if it means perpetuating Christianity’s past history and current trajectory. The only way I can stay Christian is to do so as part of a creative movement forging a new kind of Christianity,”
― Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned

“We have also seen that it is easy to mistake literary representation (the use of vivid imagery to denote space-time reality and connote its theological significance) for metaphysical representation (whereby a ‘spiritual’ or ‘transcendent’ being is the heavenly counterpart of an earthly reality); and that in this confusion it is all too easy to imagine that language which, in a culture other than our own, would be recognized as highly figurative, is flatly literal.”
― N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God

“Sometimes we miss the immediacy of Jesus’ warnings because we project his parousia74 into the eschatological distance. When we read his parables that refer to a returning bridegroom, landlord, or king,75 we usually assume that Jesus was foretelling his second coming and the judgments of hellfire. In fact, the surprise visit/return in most of these parables probably refers initially to Jesus’ incarnation, his resurrection, or once he is rejected, to the resulting chain of events that bring down Jerusalem in AD 70. In other words, if the parousia refers to Jesus’ own generation, rather than to the end of time, then Jesus’ use of the historic destruction in Gehenna circa 587 BC is not a metaphor for John’s eschatological lake of fire. Exactly the opposite. John’s apocalyptic lake of fire is a visionary picture of Gehenna’s historic pyres, prophesied by Jesus (reiterating Jeremiah) and fulfilled in AD 70. More simply, Jerusalem’s destruction does not direct us to apocalyptic visions of fire; the heavenly visions indicate the earthly reality.”
― Bradley Jersak, Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hope, Hell, and the New Jerusalem