Here is my interview with Lynn Cohick about her forthcoming Ephesians commentary in the NICNT series (Eerdmans) which is due for release in November 2020. You published your first commentary on Ephesians back in 2013 (for the NCCS), you’re about to publish a more extensive commentary in 2020 (for the NICNT series). What have you learned about Ephesians in that time? In the time since I wrote my NCCS commentary, I had more time to explore ways to approach the... Read more
John Goldingay. An Introduction to the Old Testament: Exploring Text, Approaches and Issues. Downers Grove: IVP, 2015. Available at InterVarsity Press. By Jill Firth In his inimitable style, John Goldingay brings a distinctive approach to an Old Testament introduction. ‘I spend little time telling you what the OT says or what scholars say,’ Goldingay explains in the Preface. His aim is to enable students to study the OT for themselves, so the book focuses on background information, hermeneutics, and raising... Read more
Who is the Beloved Disciple of the Fourth Gospel? John the apostle, John the elder, Thomas Didymus, Lazarus, an “ideal” disciple, a literary fiction, who? According to Harold Attridge: The unidentified Disciple is a challenging riddle that invites readers to return to the Gospel in an attempt to solve the riddle. Whatever they do with the riddle, they will probably stumble across that other major witness, the only true and reliable witness to the Father, and, if they do so,... Read more
The second edition of Evangelical Theology is available on 20 October 2020! Here’s some of the endorsements for the second edition. “I warmly welcome this second edition of Mike Bird’s Evangelical Theology. The gospel both generates and governs Christian faith, but systematic theologies sometimes smother it under the weight of conceptual schemes, confessional traditions, or social agendas. Not on Bird’s watch. The gospel is front and center in all eight parts of this thoroughly revised, wiser, wider, and wittier work. With its... Read more
Just came across this great quote from Craig Koester, The Word of Life: A Theology of John’s Gospel, pp. 25-26. John writes about God for an interreligious world. He does not offer theoretical arguments for God’s existence, since everyone in the story assumes that there is a God of some sort. The problem is that their ideas about God conflict. There are Jews who worship at the temple in Jerusalem and Samaritans who insist that God should be worshipped on a... Read more
Some months ago, Ridley College hosted a discussion panel with Australian novelist Christos Tsiolkas about his novel Damascus which tells the story of the apostle Paul. The novel is graphic to be point of being lurid, however, it captures the darkness and brutality of the ancient world. Tsiolkas is nakedly and vulnerably honest about his encounters with the Greek Orthodox and Evangelical Churches and his sexuality. Brian Rosner and Fergus King offer comments and questions to Tsiolkas. Quite an engaging panel discussion!... Read more
I’m been reading a lot about Jesus’s ethics, including Martin Hengel and A.E. Harvey, found these two cool quotes: The injustice and suffering in Palestine two thousand years ago was certainly no less than the suffering in our world today. The revolutionary prescriptions of our time for the overcoming of such injustice and suffering are likewise not always so different from those proposed then. The idea that the present-day situation has become intolerable, so that revolutionary violence has become justified,... Read more
Some of you might have heard the horrific news that Oxford Professor of Hebrew Bible, Jan Joosten has been convicted of downloading 27, 000 child pornography images and has been sentenced to a year prison in France. According to the Guardian: “Joosten was not immediately committed to prison. His sentence would be supervised, and may be amended, by an independent judge, AFP said. The court also ordered a three-year programme of treatment and barred him from any activity bringing him into... Read more
A while back on Church Leaders, N.T. Wright was interviewed on what he thinks about women preachers. Here’s what he said: “The usual idea that women were kept down in the ancient world and it’s only recently that feminism has brought them back up is quite wrong,” Wright argues. The theologian, who recently published a book called The New Testament in Its World, said women who had some authority in the church and society were not anathema in the ancient world.... Read more
Dayton Hartman Jesus Wins – The Good News of the End Times Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2019. Available at Lexham. Review by Stephen Gilmour When it comes to the millennium, some Australians defer to the position known as panmillennialism – the view that it’ll all pan out in the end. While this is a typically Australian way of avoiding controversy, it also makes an important point. It articulates that though we can’t be certain of every specific for the end times,... Read more
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