In a recent issue of Expository Times, Chloe Lynch has an article on “In 1 Peter 5.1-5, who are the Presbyteroi and what is said about their role?” ExpT 123.11 (2012): 529-40. On the Elders: Who, then, are the elders in 1 Peter 5:1-5? It is proposed that they are those operating as leaders within the Christian communities to which Peter writes. The concept of eldership probably derived both from Jewish and Hellenistic contexts, in which elders had influence dependent upon community status.... Read more

I was spending some time yesterday afternoon preparing for my Intro to the Bible course for this fall. It is getting close to the start of the fall semester, which is hard to believe. One of the textbooks I’m going to use for the course is my former colleague (that still hurts to say!) Scot McKnight’s book The Blue Parakeet. In the first chapter He has a poignant reflection from his teenage years when he was filled the the Holy... Read more

I think there is nothing wrong with a paraphrase, as long as you tell people it’s a paraphrase, and you recognize that it has an additional and deliberate interpretive layer imposed upon the text in order to help people understand the gist of the text. All translations include interpretation, paraphrases do the interpretive part a lot more explicitly and with some artistic license. Below is my paraphrase of Mark 1.1-15, true to the gist of the text I hope, but... Read more

Aaron White, a Covenant Theological Seminary grad and a Ph.D student at the University of Bristol, has a new blog called Mosissimus Mose. Read more

Colin G. Kruse Paul’s Letter to the Romans PNTC; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012. Available at Amazon.com Colin Kruse teaches at the Melbourne School of Theology. I first came across Colin Kruse’s work when I read his helpful volume Paul, the Law, and Justification, which was one of the most helpful and nuanced things on Paul back in the late 1990s (esp. on the “righteousness of God”). It was formative for for my own book The Saving Righteousness of God. I also... Read more

I say well done to Jared Wilson for having the humility to take down the controversial post about marital sexuality and male dominance. He gives some explanation and apologies here. I don’t think this retraction is a matter of caving into feminist zeal, but it is a mark of recognizing that talking about male-female relationships requires biblical precision, cultural nuance, and pastoral sensitivity. The offending post did not have these. While no malicious intent was made in the original post,... Read more

This year Crossway College’s annual Eric Liddell Lecture on Missions and Theology was delivered by the Rev. Dr. Graham Cole, who is Anglican Professor of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School. The topic of Dr. Cole’s presentation was “A churchless engagement with a Christless world: 1 Peter and Mission”. Very good, well worth listening to! Listen to the lecture here, or else, click on it at the Crossway College webpage here. Read more

Today is my wife Karla’s 40th birthday. We first met at university when she was 18; we’ve been together now half her life! Its is really hard to believe that we are in our 40’s and about to enter our 2nd decade of marriage (19 yrs on July 31). Karla is an awesome individual. And I am so privileged and blessed to share this life with her. She is sharply honest, super funny, intuitively discerning, and a great cook [!]... Read more

What is gaining notoriety around the blogosphere is a TGC post by Jared Wilson which gives an extensive quote from Doug Wilson about rape and sexual pathology. The huge grievance many folks have, and I’m one of them, is that the sexual act between men and women is described in terms of domination and power. Read this: When we quarrel with the way the world is, we find that the world has ways of getting back at us. In other words,... Read more

My buddy John Dickson writes a provocative piece in the SMH that an increasingly secular culture and an increasingly aged population are disastrous. It will lead to a decline in aged care for those with intensive needs like dementia because secularism has no capacity to assign value to the mentally ill. He writes: Yale’s great philosopher-theologian Nicholas Wolterstorff goes further in his book Justice: Rights and Wrongs. He argues that a rational justification for treating humans as ”inestimably precious”, regardless of capacities,... Read more