One of the more stunning statistics found in this book has to do with religious affiliation and gun ownership. Protestants constitute the highest percentage of gun owners with white evangelicals leading the way, considerably more than Catholics, Jews, or even non-religious individuals.  So much for living by the Sermon on the Mount. And what stunned me even more is this is so even though there are whole Protestant groups such as the Amish, the old order Mennonites and various Quakers... Read more

The essay by Prof. Shelly Matthews is engaging, not least because upfront she admits she’s going to do a feminist reading of our presenting issue, grounded in the earlier work of Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza.  As engaging as the essay is it has various sorts of hermeneutical problems, not the least of which is the assertion that the NT contradicts itself on the issue of violence. This is simply false and involves a superficial reading of the NT evidence.  For example,... Read more

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All too often, in our overly sexualized culture, when teenagers declare they are in love, what they really mean is the hormones are raging and they are in heat. At first, this retro movie set in the 70s during the gas shortage in Hollywood, seems to be just another story like that.  But in fact it is not just a story about sexual frisson. For one thing, the girl is in her mid to late 20s, and the boy is... Read more

  In this post we are dealing with the chapter by Prof. T.M. Lemnos, yet another OT professor (of which there is a plurality in this study, with NT scholars under-represented) whose concern is about the interface between weapon and hunting images combined with sexual imagery in the OT.  The chapter is entitled “Israelite Bows and American Guns”.  She is right that the representation of these things involves a variety of mingled together factors, and hyper-masculinity comes into the picture... Read more

One of the more shocking moments I had in the past few years was when I was invited to speak at a major evangelical university in Virginia and was in the student union and there were sign up tables there— right next to the ‘sign up for a short term mission to share the love of Jesus’ table, was a table signing students up to be members of the NRA. Which of these things is not like the other?  But... Read more

https://youtu.be/PFc31CKahbw Read more

Brent Strawn, a friend and colleague who formerly taught at Asbury with me, and then at Candler, and now is Professor of OT at Duke Divinity School has written the first major essay in this volume about the various ways people have interpreted Joshua, sometimes even as a justification for God’s people to do violence to other human beings.  The title of his chapter is “Projecting on Joshua: You Cannot Worship both God and Glock”. The major point of the... Read more

This particular post is an exercise in hermeneutics, as a ground-clearing exercise before going into the various essays in the volume edited by Chris Hays and C.L. Crouch (Westminister/J. Knox, 2021).  In the first place, what the OT says about human produced violence and what the NT says about the matter is not the same.  And this is true in spite of the fact that the ten commandments says clearly ‘no killing’ or at least ‘no murder’ and various prophets... Read more

The precis for this book on Amazon reads as follows: “Using the Bible as the foundational source and guide, while also bringing contemporary sociological data to the conversation, seven biblical scholars and theologians construct a powerful dialogue about gun violence in America, concluding that guns are incompatible with the God of Christian Scripture. God and Guns is the first book to argue against gun culture from a biblical studies perspective. Bringing the Bible into conversation with contemporary sociological data, the volume breaks... Read more