Resident Theologian
About the Blog
My latest: on Jordan Peterson, in CT
A link to my review of Jordan Peterson’s allegorical commentary on the Torah in Christianity Today.
You can’t die for a question
A follow-up reflection on biblicism, catholicity, martyrdom, and perspicuity.
Two ways of reading
One way of reading something is to ask what’s wrong with it: what’s missing, what’s out of place. Another way of reading something is to ask what one might learn or benefit from it.
A test for exegesis
Is God merely a character within the text? Or also an author of the text? The difference matters for scriptural interpretation.
Inegalitarian Acts
For various reasons I’ve been reading and re-reading Acts a lot this year. One reason is that I’m co-leading a Sunday School class through the book, slowly, chapter by chapter. This past Sunday I had Acts 15: the climactic moment in the story, the hinge of the great gentile missions of the Jewish churches in Jerusalem and Antioch.
I’m in CT on the conquest
I’m in Christianity Today with a review of Charlie Trimm’s new book, The Destruction of the Canaanites: God, Genocide, and Biblical Interpretation.
The problem with evangelicalism
There’s not only one, granted. But this isn’t one of those posts. It’s not a beat-up-on-the-evangelicals manifesto in nine parts. It’s not about evangelicals and politics, or about that popular Christianity Today podcast, or about which marks truly define an evangelical, and whether they ought to be doctrinal or sociological or other. This is a minor little comment about theology and hermeneutics. Here it is.
“The latest scholarship”
One often hears folks in biblical studies refer to “the latest scholarship” on such-and-such topic. Or they will refer to author X or book Y being “out of date.” Or when writing a scholar will refer to “the latest studies” or “the most recent research.” I’ve poked fun at this tendency before. A few years back I penned “An honest preface to contemporary academic interpretation of the New Testament.”
A sheep among wolves
If, after reading [this book], you now turn to study the historical evidence for yourself, begin with the New Testament and not with the books about it. If you do not know Greek get it in a modern translation. Moffat’s is probably the best: Monsignor Knox is also good. I do not advise the Basic English version. And when you turn from the New Testament to modern scholars, remember that you go among them as a sheep among wolves.
Blakely, Singal, and “stories”
I have a new piece in the latest issue of The New Atlantis called “Statistics as Storytelling.” The print journal is in subscribers’ hands; the issue will be online sometime this week, I imagine. (It’s jam-packed full of goodness, by the way: Nicholas Carr, Matthew Crawford, Phil Christman, Ari Schulman, Caitrin Keiper, Addison Del Mastro, and many others.) My piece is a long essay review of Jason Blakely’s book We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power. I’ll link to it in a separate post once it’s up.
Axioms of Christian exegesis
I … rejoice, as any interpreter of scripture should, to find such a clear case of prima facie contradiction [in the text]; such instances are efficacious in prompting theological thought because of the axiom that the canon of scripture is not incoherent.