Over at Eternity is the transcript of an interview I did with Kylie Beach on 3 Things Every Christian Should Know about Israel. Some highlights: When we read the word ‘Israel’ in the Bible, does it have the same definition as when we read it in the news? The modern state of Israel, founded in 1948, is not a Davidic monarchy or a Zadokite hierocracy [a ruling body of priests]. Rather, it is a secular state closely aligned to various expressions... Read more
Michael Barram Missional Economics: Biblical Justice and Christian Formation Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018 Available at Eerdmans. by Mark Simon This is a new volume in The Gospel and Our Culture Series published by Eerdmans under John Franke’s editorship. It joins a number of previous contributions which have established themselves as significant milestones in writings on missional church and missional hermeneutics (such as Guder’s Called to Witness and Missional Church; Gorman’s Becoming the Gospel; and Goheen’s Reading the Bible Missionally). The... Read more
I find it hard to deny that Paul held to some species of supersessionism, not a replacement of Israel, but certainly a redefinition of Israel based on the coming of the Messiah and the inclusion of the Gentiles. Of course, Romans 9-11 is really the key passage one has to wrestle with here. Whereas some Jewish groups conceived of themselves as an elect within Israel, Jews superseding other Jews in a salvific-eschatological narrative, Paul’s discourse is different. For Paul, the... Read more
Christopher Watkin Derrida (Great Thinkers). P&R Publishing, 2017. Available at P&R and Amazon.com By Andy Judd Christopher Watkin has achieved something rare and delightful – an insightful and accessible introduction to, and engagement with, Derrida’s thought from a reformed Christian perspective (follow him at twitter @DrChrisWatkin). This book is a well written missile of brevity and clarity. In the first part of the book, Watkin explains what Derrida is all about with the effortless grace and good humour of a seasoned... Read more
Check out Justin Brierly’s interview N.T. Wright on penal substitution. Wright gives his own view where he deals with distortions of atonement theology and argues for a more comprehensive perspective based on love and victory. I would say that while the church fathers were far from monolithic in their atonement theology, the dominating idea seems to have been something along the lines of the Christus Victor model, albeit often combined with a ransom view, or some aspect of Jesus’s death... Read more
JoAnna M. Hoyt Amos, Jonah & Micah, Evangelical Exegetical Commentary Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2019. Available at Logos and Amazon Reviewed by Andrew Judd Lexham Press’s new Evangelical Exegetical Commentary series is shaping up to be an attractive contribution to the marketplace. Like Goldilocks’ third bowl, for me they’re pitching it just right: evangelical, without being bloody-minded; scholarly, but not recondite; detailed enough, without losing the forest for the trees. So far we’ve seen eight of the planned OT volumes emerge:... Read more
If Jesus was a prophet of Jewish restoration eschatology (see Ben Meyers; Ed Sanders; N.T. Wright; Richard Horsley), then it is important to note the impact that Jesus’s restoration eschatology had upon the early church who, in the transformed post-Easter context, carried forward Jesus’s appropriation of Israel’s sacred traditions about the restoration of Israel and the inclusion of the nations in God’s saving purposes. It is in Luke–Acts that we observe how this story of Jesus as the agent of... Read more
Larry W. Hurtado Why On Earth Did Anyone Become a Christian In the First Three Centuries? The Pere Marquette Lecture in Theology 2016 Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2016. Available at Amazon.com This short book by Larry Hurtado, who sadly passed away last November, is based on his 2016 lecture giving at the University of Marquette. It is a short book, only 133 pp., but is densely packed with insights about the spread of the early church, the number of... Read more
By Joshua R. Farris and S. Mark Hamilton In our previous post, “Is Nothing Sacred?” we put several important questions to evangelicals who’ve adopted the practice of revising hymns. You’ll recall that we raised both theological and historical warning flags. You’ll also recall that we gave quite a lot of attention to Chris Tomlin’s “version” of John Newton’s, famed, “Amazing Grace.” Musically speaking, these revisions are things like minor melodic changes, or the addition of some crecendoing effect—basically whatever is popular... Read more
Christoph R. Hutson First and Second Timothy and Titus (Paideia; Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2019) Available from Baker By Michael F. Bird (from my SBL paper in 2020) There are many find commentary series available, probably too many, but the Paideia is among the best for the economic size of the volumes, the first-rate contributors involved, and the mix of clarity and insightfulness which its commentators generally show. Christopher Hutson’s volume on the PE I believe ranks among the very... Read more
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