Just saw this in the SBL catalogue from Baker! Simon Gathercole, Defending Substitution: An Essay on Atonement in Paul, 144 pp., due out in Feb 2015. In recent decades, the church and academy have witnessed intense debates concerning the concept of penal substitution to describe Christ’s atoning sacrifice. Some claim it promotes violence, glorifies suffering and death, and amounts to divine child abuse. Others argue it plays a pivotal role in classical Christian doctrine. Here world-renowned New Testament scholar Simon Gathercole... Read more

Check out the swell  review of GOTL by Mike Skinner. Wish I could use this line as a blurb!! In the end, perhaps the highest praise I can give this book is to say that it stands in my mind as a close cousin to N.T. Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God. Bird mentions in the introduction that reading JVOG was a turning point in his life – it was also the moment in my life which sparked an interest in the study... Read more

I’ve just finished my Romans commentary for the SGBC series. Had lots of fun, learned a bunch, and it made me think a heap about application in places like Romans 14. FYI, should be out Jan 2016, so don’t wait up for it! So it is Halloween right and I’m sitting here drinking some wine, and it’s got me thinking about the “strong” and the “weak” in relation to disputable matters as discussed in Romans 14. Important thing to know is that... Read more

Jonathan Huggins Living Justification: A Historical-Theological Study of the Reformed Doctrine of Justification in the Writings of John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, and N.T. Wright Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2013. Available at Amazon.com Calvin, Edwards, and Wright all walk into a bar. If you want to know what happens next then you have to read Living Justification by Jonathan Huggins an Anglican Priest (ACNA) and chaplain at Berry College. It is helpful study on the context and content of justification according to Calvin,... Read more

Thanks to Thomas Nelson, I got a free copy of The Voice Bible (TVB). I’ve been periodically working through TVB in recent years and found it very readable, refreshing, and thoughtful. It is best described as a dynamic equivalence translation with some paraphrastic embellishments to help capture the sense of what is being said the text. That is fine because all translations are also an interpretation. It came out initially in 2008 and was updated in 2011. It is produced by the Ecclesia Bible... Read more

My friend Joe Mock has a historical theological piece out on “Bullinger and the Circumcisio Christi,” RTR 73.2 (2014): 101-16. The exegetical debate about Col 2:11 pertains to whether the “circumcision of Christ” is an objective genitive (i.e., Jesus’ death) or a subjective genitive (i.e., spiritual work wrought by Christ). Mock does a good job here of pointing to Bullinger’s interpretive framework that is both covenantal and canonical. The canon testifies to the eternal covenant that God has made with human beings and... Read more

I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Dave Dunham about my Evangelical Theology. Dave raised some good questions about the role of Scripture in theology and how to balance creativity and orthodoxy in theology. You can read the interview here. Read more

A great read is Stanley E. Porter, “The Authority of the Bible as a Hermeneutical Issue,” Evangelical Quarterly 86 (2014): 303-24. Porter shows that a lot of debates supposedly about “biblical authority” are largely misdirected and are really about “biblical interpretation.” Many of the debates that court controversy are really about interpretation rather than hermeneutics or authority. He weighs into the Gundry and Licona controversies and concludes that: “It is not my place to enter into the two previous disputes in order to... Read more

Mark Goodacre links to newly digitized audio lectures by Markus Barth on Colossians and Ephesians put up by Matt Montinini. In my mind, Markus Barth is one of the most underrated NT scholars of the twentieth century. I’ve enjoyed his many works and every year I pick up at least one reprint of his works from Wipf & Stock at SBL. Now that rugby league season is, this will occupy my Friday evenings with wine and cheese for a while.... Read more

Ben Myers gives an overview of his course on christology and includes 12 Grammatical Rules on Christology. Well worth checking out. We should start a petition to convince Ben to turn this into a book. Unless some publisher wants to offer him a contract before anyone else does! Read more