Many apologists argue that, next to the existence of God, Christians should hold the deity and resurrection of Jesus at the very center of their belief system over against any particular bibliology. I think this position comes from the confluence of Reformed epistemology and the difficult issues of biblical veridicality. If an inerrant Bible is [...]
Archive for September, 2008
The Center of Christian Faith
Posted in Hermeneutics, Philosophy, tagged bibliology, epistemology, faith, holy spirit, religious experience on September 29, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Dogmatic Superstructures
Posted in Hermeneutics, tagged harvard divinity bulletin, predestination, stendahl on September 24, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The Spring 2008 Harvard Divinity Bulletin reprinted an address of Krister Stendahl given in 1984, wherein he gives this caution:
Biblical language is often a quick, light, and delightful language, which cannot bear the superstructures that have been built upon it. It will always suffer from our greed when we try to squeeze more out of [...]
John’s Christology: A Test Case
Posted in Gospels, New Testament, tagged angels, blasphemy, christology, deity, divinity, exegesis, gospel of john, jesus, qal wahomer on September 20, 2008 | 1 Comment »
None of the synoptic gospels articulate as high of a christology as John does, and precisely because of this readers and exegetes are inclined to see implications of deity just about everywhere. I’d like to briefly consider a passage from John’s account of Jesus at the Feast of Dedication and suggest that theological predisposition obscures the more prosaic and natural understanding of [...]
Is Sola Scriptura Possible?
Posted in Hermeneutics, tagged canon, catholicism, clark pinnock, deutero-canon, john sanders, magisterium, open theism, reformation, sola scriptura on September 16, 2008 | 3 Comments »
http://perennis.wordpress.com/2008/09/16/a-fallible-canon/
Michael Liccione at Philosophia Perennis made some interesting comments on the formation of the biblical canon (it’s nice to have some non-Reformed presence in the blogosphere). He takes “sola-scripturists” to task for the apparent logical inconsistency of excluding the Magisterium as an authority over interpretation, while including the books it handed down. This is the [...]
Jephthah’s Holocaust
Posted in Ethics, New Testament, tagged ammon, chemosh, child sacrifice, israelite, jephthah, judges, luther, lxx, moab, molech, translation, vow on September 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
“People will have it that he did not offer her, but there it stands plainly in the text.”—Martin Luther
It was the consensus among the church fathers as well as Jewish commentators that Jephthah did indeed kill his daughter in sacrifice; and the great majority of modern biblical scholars would agree, so Luther is not alone [...]
Aleph-Bet
Posted in Hebrew Bible, tagged acrostic, alphabet, amanuensis, israel, literacy, orality, scribes, torah on September 8, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The ancient Jews were primarily an oral/aural society, just like neighboring peoples, just like all civilizations until relatively recently, and this is born of unearthed material culture and what can be gleaned of the culture from the Hebrew Bible. In both parts of Scripture, the people are listeners, and God’s word is read and explained [...]
Autographa, Inspiration, and Crises of Faith
Posted in Book Reviews, New Testament, tagged autographa, autographs, ehrman, inerrancy, inspiration, manuscripts, textual criticism on September 4, 2008 | 3 Comments »
Bart Ehrman is one of a handful of prolific scholars successful with both popular and academic works. He published Misquoting Jesus as a non-academic book on textual criticism (perhaps the only one) and his own journey from evangelical Christianity to agnosticism. The connecting thread is that it was his understanding of the transmission process of [...]
Nomenclature
Posted in Hebrew Bible, New Testament, tagged apocyrpha, canon, deuterocanon, ecumenism, Hebrew Bible, lxx, New Testament, new world translation, old testament, septuagint on September 3, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Since the Bible is a collection of literatures, it is helpful to distinguish between the parts of the whole. Pentateuch, minor prophets, gospels, catholic epistles, are all helpful designations, even though the taxonomy is often arbitrary. What should the largest portions be called?
Old Testament and New Testament:
OT seems antipodal and inferior to NT. A “covenantal” [...]
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