Naive All Over Again?

I’ve been thinking about how a Christian evolves intellectually, and the unexpected turns in the journey. I’ve sketched out these levels of development according to my own experience and what I have seen in others.
Pre-critical naivete. This is where folk theology swells out of a two-dimensional view of the biblical literature, unimpeded by an awareness [...]

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Disingenuous Religious Practice

A WordPress neighbor wrote briefly about, as I’ll frame it, the compatibility of religion and biblical studies. Some of the responses are quite predictable, but the encouraging part is the openness. Whereas I wonder if at church on Sundays we are not, to some extent or another, being disingenuous. One can go through the same [...]

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Abraham Malherbe on Anti-Intellectualism in the Church

[Following are portions of a talk Dr. Malherbe gave at Pepperdine University, as published in Declaring God's Good News, 1964.]
…It reveals a certain uneasiness, and more seriously, a sense of insecurity which is the real basis for the uneasiness. Surely our faith and our appeal are deserving of more confidence. We cannot afford to allow [...]

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Nomenclature Redivivus

I’ve been thinking about a minor, unresolved issue for me relating to the terms we use for the two parts of the Bible. When I wrote on this before (see Nomenclature) I had forgotten an option I came across when reading John Goldingay’s Models for Interpretation of Scripture. A footnote lead me to an earlier [...]

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Brief Vitriol on “Expelled”

I finally saw “Expelled, No Intelligence Allowed,” and found it tremendously disappointing.  This was ID’s coming out party, their Nessun Dorma, so not only did I expect them to put on their best show, their most robust arguments (albeit for a general audience), but also a modicum of integrity. But the rank intellectual dishonesty puts [...]

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In Praise of Sprachgeful

Every sub-culture and every field of activity has a lexis endemic to it. In intellectual fields it is usually the concepts behind the jargon that create the steep learning-curve, but it doesn’t hurt if the words themselves are easily recognized. Theology and philosophy, owing so much to German, to say nothing of long-dead languages, have [...]

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Tone and Honesty in Theological Dialogue

In his autobiography, John Dominic Crossan laments the change in timbre of scholarly dialogue. There was a time, he says, when you could count on a certain intellectual honesty. You could assume that others would try to understand your thesis and look for its strengths. I can’t assess this kind of change in timbre myself, [...]

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