Dr. Sue Liubinskas, who recently successfully defended her doctoral thesis on Paul and ethnography here at Asbury has graciously agreed to share her testimony as to how she came to this point in life, prepared now to assume a significant teaching ministry wherever the Lord opens the door. I am so very proud of her, having seen her persevere through many trials to get to the doctoral finish lines. I’m also pleased to give you advance notice that we are… Read more

The use of the notion of prophecy and fulfillment has always been a major way of trying to relate the two testaments, and in addition the notions of type and ante-type also aided the attempt to relate the two testaments. Christian thought has always fought to insist that the whole Bible is God’s Word, and no denigration of the OT or neglect of it is adequate as Christian theology. In the name of modern inter-faith dialogue, Brueggemann and R. Rendtorf… Read more

According to Gerhard Ebeling church history is the exposition of Scripture. As Childs says in his conclusions, no one interpretative schema, singular creedal formula, or philosophical or theological system has been employed throughout the ages to make sense of Isaiah. There are however what he calls discernable characteristic features to the way Christians interpret the text, a positive repeated pattern if you will. First, and perhaps most obvious is the assumption that the Bible is the Word of God, inspired… Read more

The final chapter of Child’s review attends to the phenomenon known as post-modern interpretation of the Bible. He focuses on providing a critique of W. Brueggemann, sometimes a very strong critique— “to confuse the divine Spirit with human imaginative creativity is to introduce a serious distortion into the entire theological discipline”. There are so many problems with Brueggemann’s whole approach to the Bible, that we can only list a few here that Childs mentions or alludes to:1) there is an… Read more

G.A. Smith (1856-1942) became principle of the University of Aberdeen, an internationally famous lecturer and preacher as well. His Expositor’s Bible commentaries first on the Book of the Twelve and then on Isaiah were enormously popular and influential, not least because of their elegant prose, detailed learning, and also moving theological reflection. While Smith’s linguistic skills were good, his real gift was in offering analysis of the prophetic structures, the poetic style and metrical cadence and on the basis of… Read more

JOB DESCRIPTION When comfort turns to torment And solace leads to pain Then Job will find his master and Receive his life again. When ashes without number Burn on the funeral pyre Then suffering is consumed And an end is made through fire. Yet through the fire a figure Stands golden, purified The one who once was taunted Has now been justified. Not through the will of mortals Nor through the countless saints Can come the vindication Of Job’s quite… Read more

T.K. Cheyne (1841-1915) was a professor at Oxford who began with rather conservative views about Isaiah and the OT (partly under the influence of Delitzsch), and ended much less so. At first his work just focused on rather uncontroversial attention to historical, philological, text critical issues. He says the authorship of Is. 40-66 is an open question. By 1889, he is talking in the following way—there is a foreshadowing of Christ in Isaiah. They are not conscious prophecies. There is… Read more

F. Delitzsch (1813-90) was indeed a major commentator on Isaiah and other OT books and he spent much of his life learning and interacting with rabbinic literature on the Bible. He was involved in a project to translate the NT into Hebrew, and his knowledge of Judaism was profound. He was an orthodox Lutheran who wrote volumes on messianism, and was a confessional Christian theologian. Delitzsch agreed with Hoffmann about Heilsgeschichte encompassing both the OT and the NT, culminating in… Read more

BEN: Anne you wrote ‘Out of Egypt’ some time ago. Were you surprised when someone decided the time was now to make a movie of it? ANNE: Actually there was movie interest almost from the beginning. Cyrus Nowrasteh came along with his offer after other negotiations did not work out, and it took Cyrus several years to get the movie off the ground, due to financial difficulties. Cyrus was marvelously patient and so were other members of the team. Making… Read more

Today, when the film ‘the Young Messiah’ premiered, I was there, with about 10 other people to see it. If you have recently seen the film ‘Risen’ the similarities between the two films will immediately strike you– both focus on a centurion in quest to find Jesus (or in ‘Risen’, Jesus’ body), and both centurions discover more than they bargained for. I’m quite sure these films were independently done, so the parallels can be called either serendipity or accidental. In… Read more