Biblical Eschatology Video Course: Exploring the Bible’s Big Story

Posted on June 17, 2025 by J Richard Middleton

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 in our world and in our lives.

I have a video course on Biblical Eschatology (tracing the biblical story from creation to eschaton), which you can access at Seminary Now. There’s a sale on this week! You can start learning from 90+ streaming courses taught by leading authors and professors in Bible, theology and ministry. Get one year of access for only $120 with discount code SUMMER60 here: seminarynow.co/biblical-eschatology.

If you have taken the video course and have feedback or questions arising from the material, feel free to leave a comment on this post.

If you would like to delve deeper into the biblical story of creation and redemption and how this dynamic story impacts our contemporary world, you are invited audit my Fall course at Northeastern Seminary called Biblical Worldview: Scripture, Theology Ethics.

Find out more about the course here.

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

Posted on May 20, 2025 by J Richard Middleton

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.

Three Contemporary Laments

Posted on January 13, 2025 by J Richard Middleton

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 as protest or complaint psalms, and for good reason.

Lament as the Door to Hope

Lament psalms (like my own lament prayers) are not decorous and “proper”; they do not conform to the way that many Christians think we ought to pray. They are utterly honest, and thus often abrasive, attempts to grapple with God over situations that do not seem right.

Although there are approximately fifty psalms in the Bible that are typically regarded as laments (that is, about a third of the Psalter), the psalm that meant the most to me at the time was Psalm 88, arguably the darkest and most despairing of them all. I was particularly struck by the translation of Mitchell Dahood in his Psalms commentary in the Anchor Bible series.

To know that such honest prayers were canonized in the Bible (as models for our prayer) and to be able to articulate my own pain (no holds barred) to the Creator of the universe—that is what reawakened my faith. I gained a sense through lament prayer that God was willing to take my suffering seriously. That was the kind of God I could trust.

So it led to a deeper commitment to God on my part—in response to God’s own commitment to take suffering seriously. Indeed, God took it so seriously that it led to the cross.

Lament in Popular Music

Over the years, as I have come to value lament prayer, I noticed that there were some profound lyrics by various contemporary artists that articulated lament or protest to God, which people of faith could learn from.

Three pieces that have particularly impacted me are “Bartender” by the Dave Matthews Band (2002), “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” by the Smashing Pumpkins (1995), and “Dear God” by XTC (1986). All three songs are formulated as prayers, addressing God with complaints or questions, and calling on God for help.

“Bartender” moves generally from petition to complaint. Intertwined with verses that address first “brother of mine” then “sister of mine” and then “mother of mine,” we find two verses where the singer pleads directly to God (the Bartender) to fill his glass “With the wine you gave Jesus that set him free / After three days in the ground.” Also interspersed between various verses is the cry: “I’m on bended knees / Oh, Bartender, please!” And once, “Oh, Father, please!”

In the second half of the song, complaint dominates, with the admission that the singer is overcome by another drink, which seems stronger than the one he’s been asking for. In counterpoint to the plea for resurrection life in the first half of the song, we find (also stated in two verses) this deathly admission: “The wine that’s drinking me / Came from the vine that strung Judas from the Devil’s tree / Its roots deep, deep in the ground.” Yet perhaps complaint doesn’t quite have the final word, since the song ends with the passionate cry: “I’m on bended knees / Oh, Bartender, please!”

You can find the lyrics here to a haunting acoustic solo version of “Bartender” sung by Dave Matthews (without the band). This is the original version (with the band).

The complaint in “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” is that “the world is a vampire, sent to drain” and speaks of “betrayed desires,” while the chorus articulates the singer’s experience that “despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage.” In the midst of repeating this line over an over, there is an external voice saying, “What is lost can never be saved.” Yet the singer yearns to be significant to God, almost screaming the line: “Jesus was an only son for you!” The song ends seemingly without hope, with the refrain, “I still believe that I cannot be saved”; the external voice has been internalized.

Warning: This song is in the “metal” genre. The music is especially abrasive (which makes it even more powerful). I’ve had some older church people ask me to turn it down (or even off!). However, I used to play this song in the car on my way to band practice at church. My kids, who would often accompany me, came to call it “the church song”!

“Dear God” also contains petitions, asking God to “make it better down here” and pleading: “we need a big reduction in amount of tears.” Specific problems are cited in the first two verses, including poverty and war, which afflict “all the people that you made in your image.” And in each case God is indicted as the cause of the problem. Starvation is because “they don’t get enough to eat / From God” and war is because “they can’t make opinions meet / About God.” And each verse ends by saying “I can’t believe in you.”

Then the third verse turns to the “crazy” things written in the Bible (“Your name is on a lot of quotes in this book”) and those people made in God’s image “Still believing that junk is true / Well I know it ain’t and so do you / Dear God.” The musical variations, from gentle to insistent, with violins at one point, make the lyrics especially poignant.

Then comes the bridge, where the music first pulls back, then increases in dynamic intensity to a climax. This section juxtaposes various elements of Christian theology (which the singer refuses to believe) with a list of wrongs in the world, followed by this declaration: “The hurt I see helps to compound/ That Father, Son and Holy Ghost / Is just somebody’s unholy hoax.”

But the song ends with a highly paradoxical statement: “And if you’re up there you’d perceive / That my heart’s here upon my sleeve / If there’s one thing I don’t believe in / It’s you / Dear God.” The question is why someone who doesn’t believe in God would tell this to God. Indeed, why they would write an entire song addressed to a God they don’t believe in? Because (and that’s the point of “my heart’s here upon my sleeve”) they desperately want to believe.

It was my engagement with lament prayer that led to my book, Abraham’s Silence: The Binding of Isaac, the Suffering of Job, and How to Talk Back to God (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021). Here I addressed examples of vigorous prayer in the Bible, including the lament psalms, prophetic intercession in the tradition of Moses, and the book of Job. These examples prodded me to ask why Abraham didn’t lament or protest when God asked him to sacrifice his son, Isaac. The book ends with a theology of lament prayer applicable to Christians in a world of pain and suffering. You can take a look at the Table of Contents and read the Introduction to Abraham’s Silence here.

In a follow-up post, I will note some of the other things I’ve written on lament.

A version of this blog is posted on the Northeastern Seminary website.