The book edited by Scott Harrower and myself, Trinity without Hierarchy: Reclaiming Nicene Orthodoxy in Evangelical Theology is NOW available. You can read the TOC, preface, and introduction here. There are some cracker-lacking essays in this collection. Here’s my conclusion to the introduction. The debate about the Trinity within North American evangelicalism has certainly ratcheted up in the last 18 months.[1] It has become increasingly clear to many that a hierarchical account of the Trinity with a semi-subordinationist christology is not biblical... Read more

Given that it is May the 4th, International “Star Wars” Day, I thought I’d link to John McDowell‘s article, “Feeling the Force”: Star Wars and Spiritual Truth. In Star Wars the theme of responsibility for the life-­affirming care of all things makes sense through the surrounding and binding presence of the Force in and to all things. All things are symbionts with the Force and therefore one another, interconnected in some way in a complex web, and consequently to exploit any aspect... Read more

Page H. Kelley, Terry L. Burden and Timothy G. Crawford, Revised by Timothy G. Crawford, Biblical Hebrew: An Introductory Grammar (2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018). Page H. Kelley, Terry L. Burden and Timothy G. Crawford, Revised by Timothy G. Crawford, A Handbook to Biblical Hebrew: An Introductory Grammar (2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018). By Jill Firth Page Kelley’s classic Grammar (1992) and Handbook (1994) have been revised by Timothy G. Crawford, one of the original authors and now... Read more

Philippians was written while Paul was imprisoned, but during which imprisonment and precisely where? It has traditionally been claimed that Paul wrote Philippians during a Roman imprisonment in the early 60s, while others have suggested Caesarea in the late 50s, and others again Ephesus as the place of writing in the mid 50s CE. While certainty is impossible, I prefer a setting in Ephesus with a date in the mid 50s for several reasons: First, an Ephesian imprisonment is a... Read more

All of the PhD students ar Ridley College are required to read John A. D’Elia, A Place at the Table: George Eldon Ladd and the Rehabilitation of Evangelical Scholarship in America. Sadly, Ladd’s biography is a morality tale of seeking the praise of others. While the accuracy of D’Elia’s portrait of Ladd will be for others to decide, the story D’Elia tells is both compelling and dare I say common. D’Elia describes Ladd’s struggle with his own inadequacies as a “wound that had... Read more

Just came across this quote from Brian Blount, sounds like a good Good Friday quote: “As the apostle Paul notes, God takes what humans intend to be the definitive act of disfigurement and dishonour and reclaims it as something uniquely revelatory. Capital punishment. Death. On a cross. The end of a life that reveals the meaning of life. In that case, the cross is the consummate act of divine irony. What the Romans believed to be the cessation of life... Read more

Over at theLab is a good article by my doktorsohn Dr. Chris Porter about being “The Interdisciplinary Scholar.” Chris wrote his PhD thesis on a social-identity interpretation of Gospel and Letters of John which was a real saga, I mean, “structural analysis of group arguments,” along with comparisons with Qumran and Philo, NT exegesis, Johannine community, etc. Perhaps the highest quality for an interdisciplinary scholar to practice is a continual intellectual humility. In any academic discipline the expanse of unknown material... Read more