Over at TGC, Kevin DeYoung Chimes in on the Trinity Debate with a blog post on Distinguishing Among the Three Persons of the Trinity within the Reformed Tradition. After surveying several leading Reformed thinkers in the European and American traditions, DeYoung surmises: I find that some proponents of ESS answer Ursinus’s question—“How are the three Persons of the Godhead distinguished?”—in a way that is foreign to, and really at odds with, the Reformed tradition. All five representatives (Ursinus, Pictet, à Brakel,... Read more

Over at RBL is my review of Timo Eskola, Beyond Biblical Theology: Sacralized Culturalism in Heikki Räisänen’s Hermeneutics (Leiden: Brill, 2013). Read more

The Sage Publishing Group is hosting a great conversation about Academic Freedom in Crisis with an opening article by Daniel Nehring and Dylan Kerrigan. They post six questions and trends for discussion: 1) exploring the censorship of ideas and the erosion of universities as places of debate. What are the long-term effects of preventing alternative ideas from being aired and how does this impact the diversity of ideas essential to a university’s purpose as a space of academic freedom? 2) The... Read more

Matthew Lynch and Matthew Bates of OnScript have a great interview with Richard Hays  on their iTunes podcast about his new book Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels. Hays talks about several things: his recent battle with cancer, the production of the book, methodology, divine christology, and it has a great quote from Rowan Williams in it! Do listen. Read more

Great article over at CT on the late introduction nineteenth century invention of using grape juice in communion. That, in the end, is the beauty of wine: It’s new life, a living beverage. The grape dies, but it’s reborn through the yeast, just as Christ died and rose again—and just as the church is granted new life whenever we taste and see that the Lord is good. That’s a message that the sickly-sweet stuff in your fridge can’t quite convey:... Read more

Last year at ETS, four resolution were passed by the society pertaining to issues about gender and sexuality: (1) We affirm that all persons are created in the image and likeness of God and thus possess inherent dignity and worth. (2) We affirm that marriage is the covenantal union of one man and one woman, for life. (3) We affirm that Scripture teaches that sexual intimacy is reserved for marriage as defined above. This excludes all other forms of sexual... Read more

As I read and wrote about Ephesians 5.3-20 for a NT Intro, these were the thoughts that formed in my head: Paul’s ethical vision here is not that of some geriatric prude fearful that somewhere somehow young people are enjoying tawdry pleasures, rather, he is calling a redeemed people to see their bodies, minds, and desires as the battle ground in a life-or-death confrontation between the powers of evil and the kingdom of God. Read more

Over at Newstatesman, British author Tom Holland writes an article on Why I Was Wrong About Christianity, where he acknowledges that his ethics are not Greek or Roman, but Christian! By the time I came to read Edward Gibbon and the other great writers of the Enlightenment, I was more than ready to accept their interpretation of history: that the triumph of Christianity had ushered in an “age of superstition and credulity”, and that modernity was founded on the dusting down... Read more

I’ve interviewed Tom Wright about his forthcoming volume The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’ Death, which will hopefully be published with CT sometime soon, but here’s one quotation from Tom that I have to share in advance: We have swapped our biblical heritage of new heavens and new earth for a form of Platonism (‘going to heaven’ – which you find in the first century in Plutarch, not in Paul!); we have swapped the biblical vocation of... Read more

The Daniel Andrews State Government of Victoria has recently proposed legislation to remove the rights of faith-based organizations to insist on religious criteria for employment in any of their houses of worship, schools, or charities. While the legislation attempts to curtail the ability of faith-based groups to discriminate against persons on the basis of gender, sexual identity, and religion, by doing so it enacts a fully-fledged Erastianism whereby the state dictates the parameters belief to religious bodies. The move is... Read more