In scholarship you need a thick skin and you have to be willing to accept that criticism of your work can come at you fast and furious. Sometimes the criticism can be rather humbling especially when it has some degree of validity and publicly airs your mistakes for all to see. At other times the criticism can be more frustrating because you feel misunderstood when a reviewer hasn’t really grasped what you were arguing. And then there are days when... Read more

Just read a delightful piece by Julie Canlis, “Beyond Tearing One Another to Pieces: Union with Christ in Reformed Scholarship,” JRT 8 (2014): 79-88, where Canlis gives a brief overview as to why Reformed folks get so worked up about union with Christ and then gives a very good review of Con Campbell’s and Todd Billing’s recent books on union with Christ. I think Canlis points out the heart of the debate about the primacy of justification versus union when... Read more

Over at First Things, there is an article by Anna Nussbaum Keating on Why Can’t My Son Receive the Eucharist, which gives a catholic case for children participating in the Lords’ Supper/Eucharist/Communion. Gotta love this quote from Augustine: “Yes, they’re infants, but they are his members. They’re infants, but they receive his sacraments. They are infants, but they share in his table, in order to have life in themselves.” The issue of paedocommunion has been a big issue in American... Read more

Joseph M. Holden, the president of something called Veritas Evangelical Seminary (a subsidiary of Norman Geisler industries), has written a post called ICBI Inerrancy is Not for the Birds, in which he draws attention to the cancerous and conniving heretical ravings of a certain Michael Bird. Apparently this Michael Bird fellow – along with other heresiarchs like Craig Blomberg, Michael Licona, Darrell Bock, and Kevin Vanhoozer – has committed the heinous heresy of advocating genre criticism.  Yes, by asserting that the... Read more

Thanks to Rob Bradshaw, I’m part of his survey of several theological colleges from around the world, and I give a promo of Ridley Melbourne. Read more

Princeton University Press puts on a lecture by Diarmaid MacCulloch entitled, “What if Arianism Had Won?” Read more

Over at TGC, Andreas Kostenberger has reviews of both How Jesus Became God and How God Became Jesus. Good reviews. He gives a good summary: Jesus was not a mere man who only later became God; rather, God took on humanity in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Within a short decade or two, the early Christians understood Jesus’ identity was intrinsic to the identity of Israel’s God and that he wasn’t a second or lesser god but instead part of God’s... Read more

Okay, I know I’ve been flogging hard reviews and articles about HJGB/HGBJ, author promo work, but it will start petering off soon. Any way, here’s a few things about the melee that might interest folks: Over at ABC Religion & Ethics I wrote a piece on How God Became Jesus: Bart Ehrman gets it wrong again. Over at World Magazine is a piece, mostly excerpts from the book. (Yes, they let me write for WM, just don’t anyone blab about... Read more

Thanks to Jeremy Bouma, over at Zondervan’s Koinonia blog is an excerpt from my Evangelical Theology about the resurrection of Jesus Christ. “The cross without the resurrection is just martyrdom…Conversely the resurrection without the cross is a miraculous intrusion into history, a redemptive-historical enigma, and a paranormal freak show with indeterminable significance.” (436)   Read more

Michael Frost Incarnate: The Body of Christ in an Age of Discernment Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014. Available at Amazon.com A review of Incarnate: The Body of Christ in an Age of Disengagement, Michael Frost, IVP, by Kara Martin I have read several books by Michael Frost, and had feared that his latest offering would continue too closely on the missional theme, journeying over much of the territory covered previously. However, his latest offering, while on theme, contains some... Read more