Monday, August 31, 2020

About that image thing

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The nations surrounding Israel felt their idols did not just represent but actually were a localized manifestation of the god or goddess. Th...
Friday, August 28, 2020

Who decides?

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Nearer the time of Jesus, Minucius Felix, a late second- or early third-century Christian apologist, gives an insightful mockery of pagan id...
Thursday, August 27, 2020

And there was no more sea

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John’s vision in Revelation describing an oceanless new heaven and new earth thus anticipates but goes beyond the vision of the Old Testamen...
Wednesday, August 26, 2020

But how much faith is necessary?

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It is better to ask what sort of allegiance than how much , because allegiance depends on what Jesus the king commands each of us individua...
Tuesday, August 25, 2020

Aaaggghhh!

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I feel better now... sometimes you just have to vent to the air. The psalmists do it all the time, and that's where I've been spendi...

Wrong-headed question

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When I find myself wondering whether my allegiance is enough, I am forced to remind myself that this is to ask the wrong question. Indeed, th...
Monday, August 24, 2020

Works of the law

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So the Mosaic law, even though it is God-ordained, nonetheless was subject to the limitations of all such rule-based systems. Law makes the ...
Friday, August 21, 2020

Wrong focus

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Barclay, Paul and the Gift , 569, puts it summarily: “The priority of the gift is everywhere presupposed, but Paul rarely draws out predesti...
Thursday, August 20, 2020

That's NOT the point!

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Although philosophical consistency suggests that it is almost certainly the case that God—who transcends ordinary categories of space and ti...
Wednesday, August 19, 2020

Words matter

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Words, he often wrote, are themselves sacred, God’s tool for creating the universe, and our tools for bringing holiness—or evil—into the wor...

By grace, through faith, yes. But what does that entail?

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In short, we cannot say in an unqualified fashion that final salvation is by grace and by faith apart from embodied obedience, for this misun...
Tuesday, August 18, 2020

Prayer and Abraham Joshua Heschel

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Over the weekend, we went to a thrift store; it's one of the few outings we've done in the last 4 months. As always, I browsed the b...

Grace and behavior

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Contemporary Christian notions of grace also frequently fail to take into account the effective nature of grace. That is, the aim of God’s ...
Thursday, August 13, 2020

Thought for the day

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3 When the very bottom of things falls out,      what can a righteous person possibly accomplish? 4 But the Lord is in his holy temple....
Wednesday, August 12, 2020

If you confess with your mouth…

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[N]otice that in the other portion of the verses under discussion, Romans 10:9—10, Paul states that for a person to be saved, he or she mus...
Tuesday, August 11, 2020

So who reigns?

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Other terms that we today traditionally associate with Christianity were also popular as part of imperial propaganda. In the broader Greco-R...
Monday, August 10, 2020

The weekend that was

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We had a storm come through on Saturday afternoon, with winds up to 60 MPH. It knocked down both my pole bean trellis and my cucumber one; t...
Friday, August 07, 2020

So, what is this faith thing?

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“Faith is not an alternative achievement nor a refined human spirituality, but a declaration of bankruptcy, a radical and shattering recogni...
Thursday, August 06, 2020

Why foreground "Christ"?

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I would argue that the probability that Paul specifically intends to foreground the allegiance aspect of pistis in passages such as these is...
Wednesday, August 05, 2020

What is the gospel?

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The Gospel: An Outline Jesus the king 1. preexisted with the Father, 2. took on human flesh, fulfilling God’s promises to David, 3. died...