Teachers are always looking for textbooks, and good textbooks are hard to find. Those two points come from 25 years of teaching. Textbooks have to complement lectures and class sessions, and most of us don’t want to use a textbook that covers the same thing discussed in class. Charles Puskas and David Crump, an editor and a professor at Calvin, now have co-written a textbook that introduces students to the historical context, the methods at work in Gospel-Acts studies, and... Read more
We come to the end of this week’s series on gospel with a potent passage, one dearly loved by liberation theologians and justice workers and one of which many reducers of the gospel today are fearful. Here’s my opinion on this matter: liberationists tend to reduce the gospel to this text while the traditional evangelical tends to mitigate this text. Let’s embrace it and all the other gospel texts. |inline Read more
Mr. McKnight, I would like to echo a question that someone asked above, and I don’t think you replied to it (unless I missed the answer, in which case I apologize.) The question is: why are you still an evangelical, and not Catholic or Orthodox? |inline Read more
We look today and tomorrow at two formative texts for seeing what Jesus means by “gospel”. Today we begin with Mark 1:14-15, a text that is comprehensive. |inline Read more
… for the Cubs and the White Sox to play in the World Series? Read more
The last two chps of Chris Wright’s excellent book, The Mission of God, concern the most pressing topic of anyone who wants to examine the Old Testament through the lens of “mission.” I tend to think most either ignore what the OT says or distort what the OT says. Wright gets this right. |inline Read more
I’d like to have a conversation here about this piece in CT on what I am calling “ironic faith.” [Added: Originally, this ironic faith article was a part of the McLaren piece; it was lifted out and became a separate article in CT. So, there was no ending because it led to the article on McLaren.] Read more
Following John was Jesus, and he too was a gospeler, one who preached the gospel. Today I want to begin with some general summary passages that set up Jesus as a gospel preacher. |inline Read more
A few years back a friend of mine, Jay Phelan, told me about a book about a pastor and a small town in Iowa and so I bought the book and was about 50 pages deep before I realized it was a novel and that Marilynne Robinson was a novelist. The novel, called Gilead, was short enough that, having found myself that deep, I went with the story and finished it off. I have myself to blame for purchasing and... Read more
Peter Berger, well-known sociologist, goes against everyone’s grain and the fashionable, trendy screeds in this piece in Books and Culture. When I read Berger’s ideas on the train during my commute, my jaw dropped. By the way, I’m a huge fan of Books and Culture. Used with permission. |inline Read more
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