Mangum, Douglas, and Douglas Estes, eds. Literary Approaches to the Bible. Vol. 4, Lexham Methods Series. Bellingham: Lexham, 2017. Reviewed by Andrew Judd Some time ago a student came to my office to talk about his research project. His topic is New Testament hermeneutics, and while we were chatting he asked if a book existed which went through all the “criticisms” and explained where they came from and how they work – Historical Grammatical Criticism, Form Criticism, Narrative Criticism, Rhetorical... Read more

Dr. Anthony Bradley is a religious scholar at the conservative King’s College, and over at Fathom he offers a great plea to use Christian wisdom rather than an American version of individual rights to think about gun culture in America. The article is called For the Love of Students, and Bradley concludes: An individualistic and narcissistic culture is a culture obsessed with “my rights.” My “right” to an abortion. My “right” to purchase any firearm I want. My “right” to... Read more

David J. Downs The Offering of the Gentiles: Paul’s Collection for Jerusalem, in its Chronological, Cultural, and Cultic Contexts Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016. Available at Amazon.com. This book by David Downs (Fuller Seminary) is based on his Princeton PhD thesis about Paul’s collection for the saints in Jerusalem. Downs rejects prior views of the collection as an expression of the eschatological pilgrimage of the gentiles bringing gifts to Jerusalem, the collection as a type of obligation incumbent on Paul... Read more

What if there really were other inhabited planets somewhere else in the galaxy, what if we met an alien species, what if there really is a multi-verse where alternative realities existe? How would Christianity address this, could Christianity survive such a discovery, and how would we begin to make sense of such a thing? Well, this is not really a new set of questions. The discovery that we live in a heliocentric solar system and the discovery of the “new... Read more

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 as redemptive and generally salvific. It was often possible to combine Christus Victor and substitutionary atonement. Athanasius artfully combined the two together when writing about the incarnation: The Word, as I said, being Himself incapable of death, assumed a... Read more

I’ve been re-reading some of Trevin Wax’s new book Eschatological Discipleship, a great book that could be best described as reading N.T. Wright with Russell Moore glasses. Wax nails the importance of eschatology for not only theology, but for discipleship too. The most important part of the book is where Wax shows how Christianity is different to rival eschatologies, including the Enlightenment, the Sexual Revolution, and Consumerism (I wish he did Islam, Marxism, and Postmodernism, but maybe in a second edition).... Read more