Category: Biblical Studies
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My First Twitter Battle: Jesus = Apollonius of Tyana
Read more: My First Twitter Battle: Jesus = Apollonius of TyanaI recently got into my first Twitter battle – and it was epic. Sometimes, when I am done pouring through old books and ancient citations, I do searches in Twitter for various subjects that I had been reading about. A few days ago that subject was Apollonius of Tyana. I quickly found a tweet that…
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St. Augustine’s Institute for Biblical Hermeneutics (Part I)
Read more: St. Augustine’s Institute for Biblical Hermeneutics (Part I)The Bible bursts the bonds of our hermeneutical strategies. The Scriptures as the medium of divine communication are what Karl Barth called a “free Bible”. This is good news: the canon imposes itself upon us readers, transgressing the procrustean bed we inevitably bring to the table as interpreters. For Barth this fact necessitates the development…
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The Beauty of Christmas Carnage
Read more: The Beauty of Christmas CarnageChristmas is about destruction. It’s about crushing. It’s about the elimination of God’s enemies. Intrigued? Let’s see what Matthew says. And as we do, remember: there is more than one way to eliminate and enemy… In Mathew 2:2, we see Magi, likely Babylonian scientists and astronomers familiar with the Jewish scriptures from Judah’s exile, have…
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BibleMesh Interview
Read more: BibleMesh InterviewIt’s always good to talk to the person next to you on an airplane flight. You never know, you just may end up sitting next to the developer of a new state-of-the-art Bible software. This very thing happened to me on my flight to Milwaukee for this year’s annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society.…
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My Research Arsenal
Read more: My Research ArsenalI have been in a research program now for about two months. It has been both a rewarding and overwhelming experience. I imagine that most people who are involved in some sort of enormous research project spend a good amount of their time (often too much) figuring out not the actual problems of their project,…
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Hermeneutics 201: Navigating OT/ NT Connections
Read more: Hermeneutics 201: Navigating OT/ NT ConnectionsWe call the message of a biblical text its theology. This is because the message is from God and it makes demands on our lives. It includes both the primary and ancillary theological principles that God inspired a text to communicate. A text’s message/theology represents the future-oriented direction of the text. In other words, its…
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Getting the Most out of Your Bible: Gaining Insights from Genre
Read more: Getting the Most out of Your Bible: Gaining Insights from GenreSound hermeneutics requires an understanding of how communication works. The Bible, after all, is God’s authoritative communication to us. There are three components of communication: words, genre, and message. “Words” refers to what we say; “genre” to the way we say it; and “message” to the reason for saying it.[1] When we decide to communicate,…
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“Being Poor doesn’t make you any Holier… or does it?”
Read more: “Being Poor doesn’t make you any Holier… or does it?”“One thing my dad always used to say was that it was only fair for him, or any pastor for that matter, to receive the same sort of compensation as any other teacher in that local market. Besides… being poor doesn’t make you any holier.” For whatever reason, about 4 years ago, this statement was…
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Pro-Marriage…but Above All, Pro-Jesus (and perhaps anti-self)
Read more: Pro-Marriage…but Above All, Pro-Jesus (and perhaps anti-self)“I can’t help but feel a little offended by Paul.” This phrase might be one you would expect to hear from one who has for the first time come across some of Paul’s passages for the first time. Perhaps from one reading his emotional introduction to Galatians. Or perhaps from another who has a hard…