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Echoes of the Old Testament in the New (Guest Post)
Read more: Echoes of the Old Testament in the New (Guest Post)I recently went to an Intervarsity meeting where we read the first half of Luke 18—the parable of the widow, and the prayers of the Pharisee and the tax collector. While everyone else read Luke, I was searching for the Old Testament parallel: what is Luke intending to echo in this story? The use of…
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Esther & Cover-up?
Read more: Esther & Cover-up?[Update (2/14/2014)—My new book Esther and Her Elusive God: How A Secular Story Functions As Scripture is now available. My posts on this site represent stages in the development of my thinking about Esther. For the full argument check out the book]. Over the last three weeks I’ve been looking at the book of Esther. In post…
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Esther & Compromise?
Read more: Esther & Compromise?[Update (2/14/2014)—My new book Esther and Her Elusive God: How A Secular Story Functions As Scripture is now available. My posts on this site represent stages in the development of my thinking about Esther. For the full argument check out the book]. Last week I wrote briefly about whether Esther belongs in the canon of Christian scripture….
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Hermeneutics of Love (Guest Post)
Read more: Hermeneutics of Love (Guest Post)Withstanding the apostles and Jesus himself, Saint Aurelius Augustine is arguably the greatest Christian theologian of the first millennium. His contributions to the understanding and development of Bible interpretation are incalculable. He was a man ahead of his time. Indeed many of the current debates on hermeneutics and postmodern literary criticism appeal to Augustine for…
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How Many Kingdoms? Abrogation and Illegitimacy
Read more: How Many Kingdoms? Abrogation and IllegitimacyOver the past couple weeks I have attempted to lay a framework for the one-kingdom v. two-kingdom debate. I have done this by providing a brief sketch of crucial post reformation thinkers on the issue such as Abraham Kuyper and the later neo-Calvinists. Here we saw that while Kuyper was nowhere near an outright departure…
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God with Us
Read more: God with Us…A manger was His Throne. From “Rise and Shine” by Andrew Peterson The aforementioned lyric from Andrew Peterson serves as a great illustration of the paradox that is “God with us.” Stop and think about that for a minute: God with us. Not God for us, or God near us; God with us! If that…
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Philosophy in the Bible
Read more: Philosophy in the BibleEarlier this year I submitted the following entry for The Lexham Bible Dictionary. This will be the entry for “Philosophy”. It’s obviously too late to change it for the dictionary, but let me know what you think anyways! (I like it alright, but the quote from Kierkegaard and the use of Kelsey make it a…
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Alcohol in the Bible: Part One (The Old Testament)
Read more: Alcohol in the Bible: Part One (The Old Testament)“Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” This quote, uttered by Benjamin Franklin, is closer to the mark than most Christians may realize. Growing up in a fairly conservative evangelical tradition (albeit in Las Vegas!), I was basically raised to believe that alcohol was evil. Period. The Bible was…