It would be difficult to find a better short statement on the inspiration of Scripture than this: “Those things revealed by God, which are contained and presented in the texts of Holy Scripture, were written under the influence of the Holy Spirit . . . . In the process of composition of the . . . . Continue Reading »
Augustine doesn’t think interpretive pluralism as a big problem: “What difficulty is it for me when these words can be interpreted in various ways, provided only that the interpretations are true? What difficulty is it for me, I say, if I understand the text in a way different from . . . . Continue Reading »
I wrote this early this morning and forgot to press “Publish,” First Things posted an exchange between Christian Smith and me on the topic of biblicisim: http://www.firstthings.com/ . . . . Continue Reading »
“Christianity isn’t a list of rules, it’s a relationship” is how the cliché goes and I’ve never been very fond of it. While I agree that Christianity is about the transformative power of the gospel in the real lives of God’s children and not about keeping . . . . Continue Reading »
After quoting extensively from Isaac Watts’s nationalistic renditions of the Psalms (Psalm 47 is made to say “The British islands are the Lord’s, / There Abraham’s God is known”), Willie James Jennings ( The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race ) . . . . Continue Reading »
Paul Griffiths is always wise: “religious reading requires the establishment of a particular set of relations between the reader and what is read. These are principally relations of reverence, delight, awe, and wonder, relations that, once established, lead to . . . close, repetitive kinds of . . . . Continue Reading »
In his dense 1967 monograph on Homer and the Bible , Cyrus Gordon argued that the Iliad was written not for the sake of art only but to inspire the imagination of a Greek nation: “it does not divide Greek from Greek. The Trojans and their allies are treated with as much decorum and honor as . . . . Continue Reading »
Pity the radical. For every radical, there’s always someone more radical still, someone who plays “more radical than thou” with greater skill. Recent New Testament scholarship has highlighted the “counter-imperial” import of the gospel. In some ways, this is a healthy . . . . Continue Reading »
Smith again: Step #3 is to “notice the Bible’s inability to settle matters in dispute.” He points to “the women’s issue,” war and pacifism, creation, the millennium, mode of baptism, etc. Several responses. On the surface, he’s right. The church has had . . . . Continue Reading »
Christian Smith is on a roll. The Notre Dame sociologist came out earlier this year with a critique of “biblicism” ( Bible Made Impossible, The: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture ), about which I hope to write more later. He more recently has published a . . . . Continue Reading »
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