And now, for something (not) completely different. In recent months, I have been working on Old Testament and early Jewish history. As a total break, I thought, I would read a book on Aztec history and mythology, David Carrasco’s City of Sacrifice: The Aztec Empire and the Role of Violence in Civilization (1999). It’s a fine book, but for my purposes, it was a fool’s errand. Wherever I go, I keep finding new approaches to that ancient Jewish world. Carrasco... Read more
Mennonite World Conference doesn’t happen every day. In fact, it’s held only once every six years, and it rotates among five continents. That means that the event is located in North America only once every thirty years. So our young family with four young children went to great lengths to attend the international assembly several weeks ago in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. We joined over 7,000 Mennonites from around the world. The gathering was sobering. Just weeks earlier, Mennonite Church USA had... Read more
Over at the Washington Post’s Acts of Faith blog, I have a piece on the strange decline of Mike Huckabee as a Republican presidential aspirant. I really liked Huckabee in 2008, but it has pretty much been all downhill from there. Supporting David Barton, getting his Fox News gig, and now playing the “Nazi card” on the president? “On paper, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee should probably be the evangelical darling amid the great wash of Republican presidential candidates. Instead, he remains mired... Read more
Snake handling churches are back in the news after a Kentucky man died from a rattle snake bite at a recent worship service. If this piece of news failed to show up during your daily Internet browsing, your sources might be insufficiently cosmopolitan. If there is any religious practice in America that receives smirks from both secularists and educated believers alike, it is this curious practice from the Southern foothills of Appalachia. Today, there are an estimated 125 snake-handling churches... Read more
Bill Hamblin is presently not saying much in our continuing debate. Frankly, I am pretty much done with the whole thing, and plan to end my contributions to the exchanges, unless he specifically makes any statements demanding a direct response. For me, the whole Book of Mormon thing is about historical methodology, rather than that Book itself, and I’ve made all the points I wanted to. Anything I said from now on about the Book of Mormon would be repeating... Read more
I have posted frequently about the major change that occurs within Judaism in the two centuries or so before the time of Christ: the major growth of belief in angels, Satan, a Last Judgment, the Messiah (or messiahs) and generally a strongly Dualist world-view. These are all ideas that we see well represented in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and of course, they provide the matrix of early Christianity. Often, this package of beliefs is attributed to Persian and Zoroastrian influence,... Read more
What causes changes in the way Christians understand God, salvation, or the afterlife? Peter Brown reminds us that as much as historians seek to understand and explain change over time, it is no easy task. In The Ransom of the Soul, his most recent topic is how and why Christian understandings of the afterlife (and relations between the living and the dead) changed between the third and seventh centuries. He begins his story with the idea that most souls remained... Read more
Here I offer my contribution to the Evangelical Channel’s Theme: Why I am (Still) Evangelical. In graduate school, I minored in theology. During my time there, the theology department was unabashedly progressive–at least by evangelical standards. Most students considered Jürgen Moltmann too conservative, and virtually no one had read Carl Henry. In spite of this (or maybe because of it), I thoroughly enjoyed my theology courses and look back at them with fondness. Despite my persistence as an evangelical (and Southern... Read more
This article is part of the Patheos Public Square on the Future of Faith in America: Evangelicalism. Read other perspectives here. Devout and secular Americans alike have been heralding the decline of traditional faith since the time of the Puritans, but American religion always confounds reports of its demise. The crumbling of evangelical Christianity, in particular, is a favorite narrative of many in today’s media, and is even a popular story among certain Christian pollsters. In spite of worrisome signs in segments of... Read more
I steal my title from a classic book on early Scottish history by Alfred P. Smyth. My defense in doing so is that the phrase does offer useful light on large stretches of Jewish history, particularly during the Second Temple era. As I have posted on this period of Jewish history in recent months, especially as described by Josephus, I have often found myself using the term “warlord.” I have used the phrase for the Tobiad leader Hyrcanus, who around... Read more
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