Today most Christians know that Christianity is not Judaism. What separates a Christian from a Jew, among other things, is centrally the belief in the Trinity – one God in three persons. No good Jew, it is assumed, would believe that! It is also assumed by most that the belief in the Trinity, particularly the divinity of Jesus, was an unprecedented later development in the wake of the burgeoning church. If the confession of Jesus’ deity and its implications were... Read more

Denny Burk refers to two sessions at T4G that argue that personal holiness needs to be actively cultivated (David Platt) and that sanctification actually requires effort (Kevin DeYoung). This is a good corrective to a Reformed mantra that sanctification just rolls off believing more deeply in Jesus. I posted on this topic a while back when I talked about the danger of sanctification with an indicative but no imperative. Read more

Over at the ABC, a young Melbourne lawyers has a great piece on the right of religious communities to discriminate. It is called Discrimination isn’t always such a bad thing. Read more

Is Judaism the background of the Christian faith? I am a child of what has been dubbed the “Third Quest” for the historical Jesus. This was the term given to the study of Jesus since at least the early 90’s which focused the study of Jesus on his Jewish context. Notable figures of the Third Quest are Crossan, Meier, Wright, Sanders, Charlesworth, Allison, Thiesen, just to name a few. These days it is hard to find any NT scholar that... Read more

Peter Leithart re-posts a classic piece about the liturgical church. A stranger coming into our church might be forgiven for mistaking our liturgy for an Anglican or Lutheran one.  Yet I’m not afraid of becoming Episcopalian because our liturgy is not “essentially the same” as an “Episcopalian” (that is, a squishy, Scripture-avoidant mainline)  liturgy, any more than Luther’s Deutsche Masse was the “same” as the Catholic Mass because they shared structural similarities.  For Luther and for us, this isn’t  merely a matter... Read more

IVP has a good interview with Tom McCall about his book Forsake: The Trinity the Cross and Why it Matters. Good discussion on the theme of divine abandonment. Read more

McMaster Divinity College has launched a new on-line journal called Biblical and Ancient Greek Linguistics edited by Stanley E. Porter and Cynthia Westfall. The purpose of the journal is: “Biblical and Ancient Greek Linguistics (BAGL) is an international journal that exists to further the application of modern linguistics to the study of Ancient and Biblical Greek, with a particular focus on the analysis of texts, including but not restricted to the Greek New Testament.” The first two articles are: 1.1... Read more

Again, over at ABC Religion & Ethics, John Milbank has a stimulating article on After Rowan: The Coherence and Future of Anglicanism. Particularly enjoyable was his remarks about the need for proper divinity schools in the UK (and I would say a fortiori in Australia/New Zealand). The Church of England needs to make higher education its top priority – especially given that it can no longer necessarily rely on the universities providing theological courses if they are given no ecclesial... Read more

Last night on the ABC’s Q&A, atheist-at-large Richard Dawkins went head-to-head with the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney Cardinal George Pell (see here). No offense to Pell, he’s a Pastor to priests, a manager of huge resources, and a spokesperson for thousands of people, but he does not have the intellectual and philosophical clout to take on a professional Christian-basher. I mean, Pell used to be a professional football player (as much as AFL is “football”). So Pell was a poor... Read more

Over at Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth, Nick Norelli begins his review of Paul and the Gospels (edited by myself and my co-blogger Joel Willitts).  Nick kicks off with a review of the first two essays on Paul and Mark by Michael Bird and James Crossley. Its fairly comprehensive and Norelli sides with Crossley in terms of non-Pauline influence on Mark.  He writes: It seems to me that Bird’s essay operates according to the assumption of Pauline influence and... Read more