Theology Seeking Eschatology
Biblical Theology / Featured / Eschatology
by Tommy Keene · Published April 1, 2025 · Last modified April 3, 2025
On the one hand, the delay is a function of God’s desire to see “everyone” repent, since he does not desire the death of the wicked. At the same time, it allows the people of God to grow (in the case of the New Covenant, through covenant children and through evangelism) in number and in maturity until it is sufficient (quantitatively and qualitatively) to be caretakers of the promised land, that is, the world to come.
Each gospel highlights, in their very first sentence, the importance of where the gospel story begins, and yet each of the gospels begins in a different place.
I recently had the great privilege of joining Nancy Guthrie and my mentor and friend Dr. Dick Gaffin for a podcast about Pentecost. Pentecost is a surprisingly under-appreciated moment in the history of redemption.
This series will capture that process: the process of coming to understand how the Greek works. I know a lot about Greek, but I also don’t know a lot about Greek; in other words, I’m just like everyone who reads the GNT. I begin with what I know and then I have to puzzle through and research what I don’t. I hit a stumbling block; I get confused; I make mistakes; I double-down on those mistakes; I get corrected; I do research and (hopefully) reach a resolution.
In honor of “paper-writing season” at universities and seminaries everywhere, I present to you a brief list of Bad Theses.
We are made storied creatures. We are bound by a story; we are anchored in a narrative. This world in which we live and move and have our being is God’s world, and God has given this world a narrative structure. It’s all one big story. We have to understand the word of God within that story.
Paul’s definition of the Gospel keeps going. Jesus continues to work by appearing to and appointing apostles. These apostles were eyewitness. They had unique authority. They are empowered to exercise that authority by the Holy Spirit. And at least part of what that authority entails is testimony.
The NT is that testimony. It is the apostolic deposit, the word-work of the eyewitnesses, the tradition that Paul and Peter and John entrusted to the church, the confession upon which the church is to stand and hold fast.
For Christians, theology and history are inextricably linked. Our theology and our way of life is described precisely in terms of what happened.
The church speaks as one: we are Judean and Greek, we are one body, we will affirm one another’s expression of our common faith in Jesus the Christ. Amidst the diversity of Christian expression–some Christians live like Judeans and are zealous for the law of Moses (Acts 21), and some live like Gentiles (and yet have forsaken the ways of their forefathers, 1 Pet. 1:18)–amidst the diversity there is, nevertheless, a common core: Christ is Lord.
It never claims to be a cohesive and singular work; on the contrary, the NT writers everywhere acknowledge that they are individual representatives of a larger body. They are “eyewitnesses,” and let me put the emphasis on the plural there. The whole point of Christianity is that it does not stem from the testimony of one man, but rather a plurality of women and men united only by the compelling evidence of what they saw.
