Two great guys in Louisville, Dustin Bruce and Brian Renshaw, do a really nice review of my book What Christians Ought To Believe on The Margin Podcast. Fun to listen to! Read more

In ExpTim 128.11 (2018) is a good exchange between Beverly Gaventa and John Barclay about Barclay’s book Paul and the Gift. Gaventa’s critique includes: – God’s gift includes the continuing beneficence of the giver to cause believers to endure. – Paul is not concerned to fulfill some sort of ancient sense of moral order. – Paul can talk about Jesus’ death in terms other than a gift. – A neglect of the back end of Romans 8 concerning God’s triumph over the... Read more

Just saw that this is out from Mark Nanos via Wipf & Stock. I don’t always agree with Mark, but I find him somewhere been stimulating and frustrating, worth reading. The commentary tradition regarding 1 Corinthians unanimously identifies the “weak” as Christ-followers whose faith was not yet sufficient to indulge in the eating of idol food with indifference, as if ideally Paul wanted them to become “strong” enough to do so. Commentaries also do not hesitate to explain that Paul advised... Read more

Preston Sprinkle is a great NT scholar (see his BBR articles on homosexuality in the ancient world), but he also has a real pastoral heart. In addition, he heads up The Centre for Faith, Sexuality, and Gender, and I frequently recommend to students his book People to Be Loved: Why Homosexuality is Not Just an Issue. Sprinkle has a generous yet critical response to the Nashville Statement, noting its pros and cons. He begins: “It is ironic and possibly prophetic that... Read more

David deSilva gave a great lecture at a Wheaton College conference about Honour and Shame. Here is his plenary address: Reciprocity and Patronage in the NT: What does it Mean for the Gospel Today?     Read more

I have finally had a chance to read and reflect on the Nashville Statement and can now offer some thoughts on it. First,  I know and genuinely respect some of the people who signed it, and I can understand why they did. We are living in a pansexual age where there is a serious cultural contest over what it means to be a gendered human being and the very meaning of human sexuality itself. What is more, we can see peculiar... Read more

Andrew Prince The Contextualization of the Gospel: An Evangelical in Light of Scripture and the Church Fathers ACTh Monographs Eugnene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2017 Available on Amazon.com My friend and former colleague, Dr. Andrew Prince (Brisbane School of Theology) has just published his PhD thesis which is a comparison of the Book of Acts and John Chrysostom on contextualization of the gospel. Here’s the blurb: There has been heightened interest and prolific publication by missiologists about contextualization since the... Read more

Richard Bauckham’s James (NTR; London: Routledge, 1999), p. 1, opens with some choice quotes from Soren Kierkegaard on Christian, specifically, biblical scholarship. Christian scholarship is the human race’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the New Testament, to ensure that one can continue to be a Christian without letting the New Testament come too close. It appears to me that on the whole the great mass of interpreters damage the understanding of the New Testament more than they benefit an understanding of... Read more