How to tell the biblical story in a way that makes a difference
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Fishers of people and the judgment of Gehenna (2 comments)
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My book In the Form of a God: The Pre-existence of the Exalted Christ in Paul has been available for a little while now, from the publisher and other major sources, both in print and as an ebook (Nook, Kindle). Here I want to give a bit… (30 Nov 2022 | 5 comments)
I am coming to think that the current mainstream view regarding “image of God” in Genesis 1:26-27 is mistaken. The consensus is that behind the expression is the idea that God is king, that he rules the cosmos, and that he has delegated some part of… (23 Nov 2022 | 0 comments)
Looking around for discussion of a theology of climate crisis, I came across a brief summary of the work of Gijsbert van den Brink, University Research Chair for Theology and Science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The piece is by Matthew Wiley… (18 Nov 2022 | 2 comments)
“It is a conviction of the church,” Matthew Malcolm writes in From Hermeneutics to Exegesis, “that it shares the same redemptive-historical location as the first recipients of the New Testament documents” (61). That is an important… (15 Nov 2022 | 0 comments)
I argued in the previous post that the injunction to subdue the earth and rule over all living creatures in Genesis 1:26-28 cannot be construed in helpful modern terms as environmental stewardship or creation care. The language consistently evokes… (7 Nov 2022 | 5 comments)
There is an argument that the Bible is partly to blame for the current environmental crisis because humanity was instructed from the get-go to subdue the earth and have dominion over all living creatures (Gen. 1:26-28). The historian Lynn White… (2 Nov 2022 | 2 comments)
I have a new book coming out with Wipf & Stock before the end of the year. It’s called In the Form of a God: The Pre-existence of the Exalted Christ in Paul. It looks like it will be the first in a new series of Studies in Early… (31 Oct 2022 | 8 comments)
Christopher M. Hays and C. A. Strine have proposed a solution to the problem that Jesus seemingly promised to come back within a generation and didn’t. In a first post on Pete Enns’ The Bible for Normal People site they accept the fact that “Jesus… (25 Oct 2022 | 4 comments)
I follow the output of the Gospel Coalition site on the look out for material that I can use to illustrate the differences between, in this case, conservative theological readings of the New Testament and a narrative-historical reading. I do the… (13 Oct 2022 | 1 comment)
There’s an odd little story about a man called Jabez lodged in the middle of the twenty-three verses that make up the list of the descendants of Judah in 1 Chronicles 4. It was made very famous twenty years ago by Bruce Wilkinson’s best-selling book… (4 Oct 2022 | 0 comments)
What happens when Adam and Eve disobey God and eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? What are the consequences of their sin? How does it change things? The common assumption is that the “fall” is a catastrophic ontological… (30 Sep 2022 | 3 comments)
Shortly after the death of Jesus, two from the band of his disciples are met by the risen Christ on the road to Emmaus (Lk. 24:13-35). He asks them what they are talking about, and, a little surprised by the ignorance of the fellow, they update him… (13 Sep 2022 | 18 comments)
One of the reasons why we routinely miss the point of Peter’s explanation of what happened on the day of Pentecost is, I think, that the canonical arrangement of books encourages us to read Acts as the beginning of something new rather than as a… (2 Sep 2022 | 3 comments)
Jamie Davies makes J. Louis Martyn the pivot point of his retrospective summary of the history of modern investigations into the thought of the “apocalyptic Paul.” Martyn is the terminus ad quem of the longer history of research going back… (17 Aug 2022 | 2 comments)
In the second chapter of The Apocalyptic Paul: Retrospect and Prospect, Jamie Davies introduces what is effectively a “school” of modern interpreters who have built on J. Louis Martyn’s account of Paul’s apocalyptic thought: Martinus de… (9 Aug 2022 | 1 comment)
Jamie Davies’ book The Apocalyptic Paul: Retrospect and Prospect comes in two parts: a look back down the long road that has led to attempts to assimilate the “apocalyptic Paul” into systematic theologies, and a look forward to see where… (2 Aug 2022 | 0 comments)
I asked in the previous post about blaming Bathsheba, “If it was a rape, why isn’t it presented as a rape?” James McGrath asks to the contrary, if we call Amnon’s assault of Tamar “rape,” why do we not apply the same category to David’s sexual… (21 Jul 2022 | 3 comments)
James McGrath made this comment in response to my treatment of Bathsheba’s bathing in my previous two posts (see the links below):
I found myself unable to keep reading after you blamed Bathsheba for washing herself after the end of her… (19 Jul 2022 | 3 comments)
In response to the last post asking whether David raped Bathsheba a couple of online commentaries defending the rape interpretation were flagged up on Facebook: David’s Rape of Bathsheba and Murder of Uriah (2 Samuel 11-12) by the Theology of Work… (18 Jul 2022 | 3 comments)
Reading parts of a recent bad-tempered Twitter row about David and Bathsheba, I began to wonder whether Bathsheba is to be regarded in any sense as responsible for the turn of events. I was told that “she was really asking for it” interpretations… (14 Jul 2022 | 17 comments)
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