For my British friends, over at Expository Times, I have a piece on And Finally … Brexit Viewed from Down Under, where the whole article is available for reading.   Read more

Great lecture by Steve Walton on “Doing Theology Lukewise” his inaugural professorial lecture at St Mary’s. Read more

I’ve been reading Acts 28, Paul’s arrival in Rome, how the narrative peters out, and it has got me thinking. The final scenes of Luke-Acts might seem like an anti-climax, no miracles in Rome, no trial before Nero, no dramatic account of Paul’s martyrdom. But we have to remember that Luke has completed his task: explaining the life, death, and exaltation of Jesus in the coordinates of Israel’s sacred history; how the gospel of Jesus came to the heart of... Read more

A week ago, Rick Brannan of Logos’s LAB blog, did an analysis of all the scriptural texts used in systematic theologies, and he noticed there an absolute dearth of references to the Old Testament. Over at CT, Caleb Lindgren, has enlisted several scholars – including myself – to reflect on these statistics, in a piece called Sorry, Old Testament: Most Theologians Don’t Use You. My response was: “I found it somewhere between interesting and alarming that the Old Testament features... Read more

Over at CT I have an article called “Turning the World Upside Down, Down Under,” which is basically about how the Benedict Option is not really an option in Australia, and instead we need another approach, what I call the Thessalonian Strategy. I conclude: Remember, the center of gravity for secular progressives is the belief that they occupy the moral high ground. So our strategy needs to expose how this movement has come to represent silencing, threatening, humiliating, and penalizing... Read more

Christopher M. Hays et al When the Son of Man Didn’t Come: A Constructive Proposal on the Delay of the Parousia Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016. Available at Amazon.com Read more

I just read an interesting article by Lorne Zelyck, “Matthew 18,1-14 and the Exposure and Sexual Abuse of Children in the Roman World,”Biblica 98.1  (2017): 37-54. Normally the “little ones” are taken to refer to new disciples, who should not be lead astray by mature believers. However, Zelyck argues that: The context of Matt 18,1-14 suggests that Jesus si concerned about the welfare of children (paidion), and he presents eschatological warnings of divine retribution against anyone who scandalizes “one of these... Read more

Forthcoming from Paula Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle (Yale Uni Press) – available in late August. Often seen as the author of timeless Christian theology, Paul himself heatedly maintained that he lived and worked in history’s closing hours. His letters propel his readers into two ancient worlds, one Jewish, one pagan. The first was incandescent with apocalyptic hopes, expecting God through his messiah to fulfill his ancient promises of redemption to Israel. The second teemed with ancient actors, not only human... Read more

There’s a great review of John Gager, Who Made Early Christianity? The Jewish Lives of the Apostles Paul (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015) by Joshua W. Jipp, “Is the Apostle Paul the Father of Christian Anti-Judaism? Engaging John Gager’s Who Made Early Christianity,”HBT 39 (2017): 83-92. Gager offers a “Paul within Judaism” view, and I think Jipp is dead right in his critique, I argue similarly in my An Anomalous Jew. Jipp says: He compliments Gager: “There is much to be said for Gager’s... Read more