Quotes from Jonathan T. Pennington

To preach that Jesus is the true King over all kings, the only true Son of God, and therefore the only one worthy of worship is not merely a personal conviction of individual piety but is necessarily a public, political, and polemical proclamation.

the New Testament authors, building especially on the Isaianic vision, define the "gospel" as Jesus's effecting the long-awaited return of God himself as King, in the power of the Spirit bringing his people back from exile and into the true promised land of a new creation, forgiving their sins,[42] and fulfilling all the promises of God and the hopes of his people.

This prominence of the kingdom also orients the reader to understand that the macarisms and other wisdom being offered by the Sage Jesus in the Sermon are more than generalized, universal, human wisdom. Rather, these references to the kingdom of heaven set Jesus's teaching into the context of the Jewish story of God's reign and particularly the Jewish expectation of its eschatological consummation,53 its coming from heaven to earth.

That is, when I have not spent much time thinking about the fallen condition and redemptive solution of the passage—which is hard, spiritual, honest soul-searching work!—I find that my message and teaching tend toward mere information. It may be good, literarily astute, and doctrinally orthodox information, but it ultimately falls short of the faith-eliciting and virtue-forming goal of the Gospels.

In this there is univocality; Paul and the Gospel writers all understand their message to be one of God's reign coming in the person of Jesus through the power of the Spirit.[44] The "gospel," whether in oral or written form, is the message of God's comprehensively restorative kingdom.

Este primer ejemplo/exégesis es el más extenso y en muchos sentidos es el más complicado. Establece el ejemplo de la lectura de «la Ley y los profetas» que se está enseñando mediante seis ilustraciones.

I soon discovered that the great Christian doctrines connected more pictorially and "asiatically" when I used the classical biblical stories than when I used contemporary (and mainly Western) systematic theologies. Matthew, the most systematic of the Gospels, proved to be the ideal vehicle for teaching the major, Orthodox, Catholic, and Reformation convictions. . . . I found the earthy Gospels to be much closer to my Asian students than the profound yet more abstract Paul.

Our canonical Gospels are the theological, historical, and aretological (virtue-forming)[91] biographical narratives that retell the story and proclaim the significance of Jesus Christ, who through the power of the Spirit is the Restorer of God's reign.[92]

Jesus, Christianity, and the New Testament documents are birthed directly out of Judaism, and so whatever else we understand about their meaning must be grounded in this reality. Any reading that ignores this is a decontextualized reading that may bear some fruit but cannot be described as sensitive to the intention of the text.