Q. In his recent book History and Eschatology, our friend Tom Wright shows the rather devastating effects the Enlightenment had on separating religion and science, what is public and what is private, the natural processes and divine intervention (as if God was not always working in his creation, or that his miracles were somehow interrupting or contravening the natural order of things). How does wisdom literature help us have a more holistic approach to knowing reality, knowing God, and understanding... Read more

Q. As you say, much of Wisdom literature is poetic and metaphorical or analogical in character. And as you suggest sometimes (for example in the 4th century Christology debates, but also in recent commentaries) Prov. 8 has been over-read, not recognizing the poetic character of the material. Applying strict logic to Prov. 8-9 is rather like trying to get at the essence of a symphony by doing a statistical analysis of which instruments played when and how much. It simply... Read more

Q. Since various OT scholars have suggested, wrongly in my view, that OT wisdom literature is essentially secular rather than theological in character it was something of a bold move to start your discussion of the God of the OT by focusing on Wisdom literature. Why did you decide to do this? A. I have long been pondering possible similarities between “wisdom” and “theology” as terms which depict an integral relationship between thought and life, under God, in the kind... Read more

Q. As one progresses through this fine book, one begins to wonder why exactly it is entitled The God of the OT, when in fact, you are simply talking about the Biblical God as revealed in both the OT and the NT. How did you come to land on this particular title? A. The title of the actual Hulsean Lectures was in fact “The God of Christian Scripture”, and at one stage that was also the working title for the... Read more

Q. One thing I really always appreciate about your work, besides the obvious depth of attention to the theological pith of various texts, is your modeling attending to the whole hermeneutical arc from original context to later use of a text or an idea in the NT to contemporary discussions of relevance. Honestly, there aren’t that many scholars out there who do this, and I’m wondering why, even when many of them are practicing Jews or Christians? Why is this?... Read more

https://hillfaith.blog/2021/02/07/four-men-of-faith-to-watch-in-the-super-bowl-tonight/ Read more

Q. When I read Dale Martin’s Biblical Truths volume the thing that bothered me the most about it was his rather cavalier theory of meaning. He wanted to argue that texts don’t have meanings, people do, and anyway meaning is largely either in the eye of the beholder or in the interaction between the reader and the text, it does not lie in the text itself. This gave him permission to read all kinds of things into the text (for... Read more

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPE795oaw6Y&list=RDtPE795oaw6Y&start_radio=1 I Sure do miss these guys.  BW3 Read more

All the way back to the second century when Marcion suggested that the God of the OT was someone different from the God of the NT, there has always been the question for Christians as to what to make of the one called Yahweh.  Was he indeed the God of wrath compared to gentle Jesus meek and mild, the God of grace and forgiveness?  We are indeed very fortunate to have thoughtful and careful theologians of the OT to make... Read more

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