Category: Bible
This Is My Body Given for You
On the night Christ was betrayed by Judas, Our Lord celebrated the Passover with all of his brothers, including the traitor himself. Other than the disciple Jesus loved, eleven of His chosen men would later abandon him. In light of...
60 Questions for Pro-Choice Christians
For many evangelicals, the leaked draft decision last month felt like the culmination of many prayers, tears, hard conversations, and difficult decisions at the voting polls. Now that Roe has fallen, the most vulnerable will now have a chance to...
Aardvarks and Alphabets
Just 35 miles from my home in northeast Cambodia, there lives an indigenous minority called the Kachok. There are about four thousand Kachok in nine different villages. While they are ethnically related to other tribes in our region, as well...
Revisiting the Sacrifice of Isaac
J. Richard Middleton. Abraham’s Silence: The Binding of Isaac, The Suffering of Job, and How to Talk Back to God. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021. 272pp, $26.99. Did Abraham pass the test in Genesis 22? And does it matter for how...
The Case for Rearranging the Old Testament Books
The ordering of the books in our English Bible is standard, if not universal―seemingly set in stone, even. But that order actually embodies a break with the wisdom and practice that came before. For many years, the Old Testament was...
Book Review: Paul and the Power of Grace by John M. G. Barclay
It would be futile to try to hide my appreciation for John Barclay’s Paul and the Power of Grace, and this review will make little attempt to do so. Indeed, it is my recommendation that the reader of this review...
The Book of Revelation is for the Church
Timothy Beal. The Book of Revelation: A Biography. Lives of Great Religious Books. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. $26.95, 288 pp. First things first: Let me state my disagreement with two premises of Timothy Beal’s “biography” of the Book of...
Book Review: Sanctifying Interpretation by Chris E. W. Green
“God does not save us from interpretation but by it and for it.”[1] So claims Chris Green in the second edition of his marvelous book Sanctifying Interpretation: Vocation, Holiness, and Scripture. (Those familiar with the first edition of his book...
Advent IV: The Coming(s) of Christ and Our Hope
The Epistle to the Hebrews might not be the first place we turn for Advent readings. We hear nothing of Mary or a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes. In fact, Hebrews offers no reflections on the birth of Jesus and...
Straightening Out the Bible?: The Translator’s Text and Audience
Should a god who is neither male nor female be referred to by a masculine pronoun? Translator Jost Zetzsche raises this question in his essay, Is God Male? The Divine Chinese Pronoun. This problem, inevitable in English, was solved in...