Category Archives: Questions

My Signature Course on “Biblical Worldview: Scripture, Theology, Ethics”

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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, including “Exploring the Christian Worldview” (the undergraduate version at Roberts Wesleyan University) and “Biblical Worldview: Scripture, Theology, Ethics” (the graduate version at Northeastern Seminary).

I’ve taught non-credit versions of this course since I was a campus minister in Canada (at the University of Toronto, McMaster University, the University of Guelph, and Brock University) and in the US (at the University of Rochester, Cornell University, and Syracuse University).

My first book, The Transforming Vision: Shaping a Christian World View (IVP, 1984), which I co-authored with Brian Walsh, was based on this course.

When I began to teach the course for graduate and undergraduate credit at the Institute for Christian Studies, Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, Roberts Wesleyan University, and Northeastern Seminary, I was able to develop the content further with a deeper dive into Scripture and further analysis of our changing cultural contexts.

This Fall the course will be offered as a dual modality course, which means that it may be accessed in person (in the classroom) or remotely (by Zoom link). It may also be taken for undergraduate or graduate credit.

Although the term “biblical worldview” has been used and abused by Christians with a rigid, absolutist stance, I want to reclaim the term for the Bible’s liberating vision of shalom and flourishing. That’s the orientation of this course. 

I am planning a complete rewrite of my earlier book The Transforming Vision along these lines. It is tentatively entitled Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws: The Bible’s Liberating Worldview (to be published by Baker Academic).

I have been authorized by Northeastern Seminary to invite anyone interested to register for the course (in either modality—in person or online) for credit or for audit.

Auditors receive all the same resources as those taking the course for credit, without submitting any assignments. These resources include links to the professor’s weekly video lectures, along with links to PDFs of readings and handouts.

The course will meet for fourteen weeks on Tuesdays at 7:00–8:30 pm Eastern. The format will be a flipped classroom. Participants view the video lectures and do the readings in advance (auditors are encouraged to do as much or as little of the reading as they desire).

This weekly preparation gives participants a chance to formulate thoughtful questions that arise from the lectures and readings, which they are invited to bring to our hour-and-a-half synchronous meeting each week. These weekly meetings are a rich time of discussion and sharing, as we explore matters of biblical interpretation, worldview, theology, culture, and ethics, and their bearing on our lives.

“Biblical Worldview: Scripture, Theology, Ethics” (GBHT 5210) is a 3-credit course. The tuition is normally $575 per credit hour (thus $1,725 for the course). The fee for auditing is only $199.

If you are interested in taking the course (for audit or credit), you may use the NES Fast Application link (Fast App for short) to submit some preliminary information about yourself. Auditing students (and those desiring credit, yet not registering for a degree program) should select “Non-Degree Seeking” on the drop-down menu under “Application Type.” You don’t need to fill in all the information boxes in the app, just those with an asterisk.

When you have filled out the required information, you should email Jess Newcomb (Asst. Director of Recruiting and Admissions for Graduate, Professional Studies, & Seminary) at admissions@nes.edu to let her know you have completed the Fast App and that you want to audit the Biblical Worldview course; she will take you through the next steps for registering as an auditor. You can also call or text her at 585.565.6533.

You can read a full course description here.

You can see the course outline and topics covered here.

Here are the course objectives.

This is the list of core readings.

Will the Creation “Pass Away” When Christ Returns?

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Revelation 21 opens with an amazing vision of “a new heaven and a new earth.”

Since the Bible begins with the affirmation that God created the cosmos, consisting precisely of heaven and earth (Genesis 1:1), Revelation 21 proclaims nothing less than a new creation.

But in what sense will this creation be new?

The question is forced upon us because of the end of the verse that proclaims a new creation: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away” (Revelation 21:1).

What does “passed away” mean? Does this imply the obliteration of the original creation and its replacement with something brand new?

Jesus actually said something similar about the passing away of the cosmos in the Olivet discourse.

After instructing his disciples about a series of signs that will precede the coming of the Son of Man, Jesus states: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away” (Matthew 24:35; also Mark 13:31 and Luke 21:33).

Is this simply a hypothetical statement, to the effect that even if heaven and earth were to pass away, Jesus’s words (his predictions of the coming signs) are sure and trustworthy? Let’s not take the easy way out; let’s assume that he meant what he said.

A surface reading of both Jesus’s words and Revelation 21 suggests that the world as we know it will be gone, to be superseded by a new cosmos. The question is in what sense will the old world “pass away”?

Will God will first destroy creation (heaven and earth) and then create a replacement?

Or is this a reference to some form of transformation that will occur?

The Greek words for “pass away” are slightly different in Revelation 21 and the Olivet discourse. In Revelation 21 it is aperchomai, while in the Olivet discourse it is parerchomai. That’s basically the same verb, but with different prefixes—the prefixes par- and ap-. They don’t indicate any significant difference in meaning.

If we want to really understand what these texts mean by creation passing away, we might turn to Paul’s description of conversion as “new creation” in 2 Corinthians 5:17.

What follows is a literal translation: “If anyone is in Christ—new creation! The old things have passed away; behold, new ones have come!”

Here Paul uses the verb parerchomai (the same verb found in the Olivet discourse) for the ending of the old life, which is then replaced by a new life in Christ.

Are we to think that Paul thinks the passing away of the old life is equivalent to the obliteration of the person, who is then replaced by a doppelganger? Paul’s own writings, not to mention common sense, suggests that no matter how radical the shift required for conversion to Christ, this describes the transformation, not obliteration, of the person.

So, by analogy then, the passing away of the present heaven and earth to make way for the new creation is also transformative. It’s not a matter of destruction followed by replacement.

That’s why God says, “Behold, I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:5)—not “I am making all new things.”

Whether it is the “new creation” of persons who are in Christ or the “new heavens and new earth” promised in Revelation 21, the point is that salvation consists in the rescue and transformation of this amazing world that God so loves (John 3:16).

That’s the consistent emphasis of biblical eschatology.

For more on this topic, see my book A New Heaven and a New Earth: Reclaiming Biblical Eschatology (Baker Academic, 2014), or you can watch my video course on “Biblical Eschatology” at Seminary Now.

Here is an outline of the video course:

1. What Is Biblical Eschatology?

2. The Renewal of All Things

3. Creation is Our Home

4. The Cosmic Temple

5. Humanity as the Image of God

6. Massive Fail—And Restart with Israel

7. Exile and the Hope of God’s Return

8. Jesus and the Coming of the Spirit

9. The Church in the Power of the Spirit

10. God’s Presence on the New Earth

11. What About the Rapture?

12. Epilogue

Our Postmodern Moment: “Truth Is Stranger than It Used to Be” 28 Years Later

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Over the past decade, a number of people have commented that the book Brian Walsh and I wrote addressing the postmodern situation, Truth Is Stranger Than It Used to Be: Biblical Faith in a Postmodern Age (IVP, 1995), seemed to be written for our twenty-first century context since it spoke directly to issues current in Western (and especially, North American) culture. (As a person from the Majority World, I would say that these issues are actually global.)

One of the comments about the book’s relevance came from Chris Stratton, the editor of an online journal for United Methodist pastors and theological students called Catalyst. Chris had recently reread the book and wondered if I would write an online article reflecting on the analysis from nearly thirty years ago, exploring its significance for our contemporary situation of tribalism and toxic polarization. He suggested the title “Our Postmodern Moment.”

Chris originally asked me in 2021, but I was too busy with other writing projects and deferred the article until Spring 2023. I say “article,” but it turned out that I needed to write three articles! Or, more accurately, a three-part article.

I retained Chris’s suggestion of “Our Postmodern Moment” as the overall title and gave the three parts descriptive subtitles. PDFs of each part may be downloaded below (the original links to Catalyst are no longer active).

1. Our Postmodern Moment, Part 1: Diagnosing the Problem

Part 1 revisits the analysis of the postmodern condition that Brian Walsh and I proposed, while fleshing it out in line with how I have been teaching these matters over the years (as part of graduate and undergraduate courses on a Christian worldview).

2. Our Postmodern Moment, Part 2: The Biblical Metanarrative

Part 2 explores some of the resources of Scripture for our current context in terms of how God relates to human subjectivity, agency, and disorientation (drawing on cues I have noticed in the biblical narrative through from my research and teaching over the years).

3. Our Postmodern Moment, Part 3: Christian Discipleship in a Polarized World

Part 3 was the most difficult to write, since I wanted to give practical guidance on how to live out the Christian faith in a toxic culture, which has often infiltrated the church. It is especially addressed to pastors and other church leaders.

Three Umpires

In Part 1 of the article I retell the story (quoted in Truth Is Stranger than It Used to Be) about three umpires explaining how they judge baseball games.

Three umpires were having a beer after a baseball game. One said: “There’s balls and there’s strikes and I call ’em the way they are.” The next umpire replied: “There’s balls and there’s strikes and I call ’em the way I see ’em.” The third umpire said: “There’s balls and there’s strikes and they ain’t nothin’ until I call ’em.”

This story, originally meant to be a joke, quite seriously illustrates different approaches to “truth” in our world today; it is particularly relevant to our so-called “post-truth” culture.

Parts 2 and 3 of the article return to this story to clarify the paradox of how Christians can legitimately claim a normative position (the truth is out there), while recognizing our ineradicably subjectivity (we only approach the truth through our perspectives). This paradox has implications both for how we read the Bible and for we relate to our neighbors with whom we may disagree radically.

I would be very interested in hearing responses from readers.