Friday, May 29, 2020

Read this and weep

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I'm still reeling from the murder of an innocent man in Minneapolis by police. Then today I read this piece in Christianity Today that ...

The rule of faith (continued)

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What one sees in the rule of faith, therefore, is something of a feedback loop, what Wilken calls a reverberation of sorts and an “arc of un...

So how does it all work?

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We have learned that we, made in the image of the triune God, are relational, loving, and covenantal. This is God’s will for us and for our ...
Thursday, May 28, 2020

How did he do that?

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[W]e never see the importance of the Christian virtue of faithfulness more than we do in Paul’s long final imprisonment, and we never see mo...

Yahwism and the Rule of Faith

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But where did this corpus of Yahwistic texts come from? Who preserved it and so forth? Obviously and most mundanely, it was originally the p...
Wednesday, May 27, 2020

The power of the written word

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Another major difference between YHWH and his ANE confreres is the biblical corpus, already mentioned above, which is large in size and scop...

Death, be not proud!

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Paul no longer killed for God; but he had learned that he needed to be willing to be killed for God. It is this type of leadership and this ...
Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Not really one of the gang

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But there is also YHWH’s distinctiveness to consider. So, while YHWH is part of the gang—at least some of the time, and maybe more frequentl...

The proof is in the dying

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This long incarceration and final execution also wrote martyrdom into the church’s definition of leadership. Paul’s faithfulness and courage...
Saturday, May 23, 2020

Random question

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Random question: What do you make of an essay where the only references are to works written by the author of the essay? Does that raise qu...
Friday, May 22, 2020

One of the gang?

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We might begin by saying first that, while YHWH is more than just one of the gang, YHWH is nevertheless and most certainly a part of the ga...

A block of wood, thinly sliced

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It seems, then, that the words spoken in the past by God and now treasured up in a written form as Scripture, are not the words of God if th...
Thursday, May 21, 2020

Polemical? Maybe not

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So, to take Ps 29 as an example, if Frank Moore Cross and those who have followed him are right, that psalm was originally one for a weather...

"Yes, but" theology

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[R]eligion is alive and well in the modern church. I sometimes call religious versions of Christianity “Jesus—but” theology. Any time someon...
Wednesday, May 20, 2020

Too simplistic

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If the first response was overly historicized, this second one is overly apologetic—too confessional even, and to the extreme—but unnecessar...

Why do you do it?

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We do not behave in the right way because we covet or fear the final consequences of this in terms of going to heaven or being cast into hel...
Monday, May 18, 2020

But, doesn't that mean…

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Many people become anxious at the thought that God might be unconditionally and permanently committed to us in love—strange but true. They w...
Friday, May 15, 2020

The differences

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[T]he data presently available must be reckoned with, and this includes the material from the OT, which, despite its distinction from texts ...

Love? Or Justice? Covenant or Contract?

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If God relates to us conditionally, through a contract, in a religious way, then God no longer loves us. We must be talking about another so...
Thursday, May 14, 2020

An inadequate response

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The first inadequate response is to posit YHWH as just one of the ANE “gang,” no more and no less. In this perspective, YHWH looks like “Che...