Bock's Blog

I am in Denver at what is now called the International Christian Retail Show. I have done the requisite book signings, attended the various exhibits and dinners, done interviews on radion from 6:25 this morning for Moody radio to 4 PM this afternoon on a station for the San Antonio, Corpus Christi, Austin, and Houston areas.

It is time to introduce the new book, the Missing Gospels. So I am off to the Christian Booksellers Association in Denver with earlier stops in Memphis and New York for other business. In this newest book I look at what has caused all the fuss about these extra-biblical gospels and work through them is some detail on four topics - God and Creation, the person of Jesus, salvation, and the work of Jesus.

This is my first response to a comment. The request was to blog on Progressive Dispensationalism (often simply called PD). Let me explain what this view is. It is the idea that although God works in distinct periods of administrative structure (a dispensation is a stewardship arrangement), so that Israel is not the church is not the kingdom to come. His plan progresses through increasing realization of the one plan of God as we move from one period to the next. This means that the promises of the promissory covenants (Abrahamic, Davidic, and New) are realized in progressive stages of God's plan. So the nations are blessed through the seed Christ (Abrahamic). The seed (Christ) does his work through messianic prerogatives that involve his mediating deliverance to God's people (Davidic) and that those blessings today include the law of God written on the heart through the Spirit of God in us and provision of forgiveness of sins (New).

Well, this blog has been up and running for a little over a month. I would like to make this more responsive to your interests. So I am asking for you to feel free to put in requests for issues to be covered and comment for brief follow up on existing blogs.

Today's blog comes from Arkansas where I did another DaVinci Code talk this evening. All the standard questions came in the question time. One of the most common is what is going on in our culture that produces such interest in all things Jesus? The answer is multiple.

I suppose it would be good to define Gnosticism and Gnostic Christianity, since some today say we should no longer use the term. Gnostic Christianity refers to a movement that combines the Greek philosophy of neo-Platonism with some aspects of Christian symbolism.

It is time to turn our attention to the Missing Gospels. I will be releasing a book on this topic in August (You can check amazon.com for details). These gospels are mostly second and third century works that some claim have equal value to the four gospels for Christianity.

Every now and again we want to have some fun with this blog. It is in this vein the following is offered. Life can be hard and sometimes we just need to take a break and laugh. So we now note that we have uncovered new evidence that Mona Lisa is listening carefully to what is being said about her beloved Leonardo. This discovery was made on the site Nuclearity. Rumor has it that Steve Jobs sent her an iPod gratis. Steve is a secret Leonardo fan who was concerned that the painter's reputation was being undermined by certain claims that he had substituted a woman other than Mona into the Last Supper. Steve is a member of the Priory of Apple, whose charter members include such great women as Eve, Sophia of Gnostic creation fame (check out the Apocryphon of John), and Mona Lisa, the patron saint of all kept secrets. Mona is now said to be monitoring events very closely. Our undercover investigator caught this on jpeg as proof:

This blog develops ideas from the May 14th blog about responding to the Code because of the reader. Feedback to that post has led me to follow up my remarks there. Two questions I often get are: (1) does not engaging bring more attention to the novel, feed its marketing apparatus, making more money for someone who slandered Christianity? and (2) does not engagement constitute compromise, a kind of dancing with the devil? Where does one draw the line on engagement? These are fair questions.