How can you be a Christian? In my experience there are three big subtexts to this question these days, science, women, and sexuality. Other questions are important as well … but these are the showstoppers. How can you be a Christian when it is antiscience, oppresses women, and is homophobic? Rebecca McLaughlin addresses these as seven, eight, and nine in her book Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion. Last week we looked at the first of... Read more

From Hans Rosling’s Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World — and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. The book is filled with, well of course, facts that make us think about factfulness. Here are four graphs that tell a story contrary to what most believe: Read more

By Ruth Tucker, who is continuing her weekly series at Jesus Creed. The “coloured people”, poor as they were, had been paying their pledges for remodeling Philadelphia’s St. George’s Methodist Church, “and just as the house was made comfortable, we were turned out from enjoying the comforts of worshiping therein.” These are the plaintive words of Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME). “If you go to Philadelphia today and stop at the corner of Sixth and... Read more

Andrew Bartlett, in his new book Men and Women in Christ (MWiC), asks if marriages depict Christ. This was the only driving theme of a book by John Piper, who has influenced this conversation as much as Grudem, but for some reason Bartlett never takes up interaction with Piper. Anyway, here are Bartlett’s conclusions, some of which lean a little more complementarian and others a little more egalitarian: 1. The only marriage at the completion of the new creation will be the... Read more

Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. BCP Read more

This is an image of what a Denisovan looked like (story below). Well, maybe, perhaps, but not likely: Researchers claim to have identified an anchor from St. Paul’s shipwreck on the island of Malta. According to Christian tradition, the apostle was shipwrecked on the Mediterranean island during an ill-fated first-century journey to Rome. “The ship struck a sandbar and ran aground. The bow stuck fast and would not move, and the stern was broken to pieces by the pounding of... Read more

By Mike Glenn I can remember when I walked out of my last class at seminary. I had turned in all of my papers and finished all of my exams. I was done. Driving off the campus, I made a promise that I would never read another book or write another paper as long as I lived. I thought of that naïve promise as I looked at my desk this morning. On one side of my desk are the books... Read more

I said to a friend last Sunday that pastors seem to avoid preaching Hebrews even more than Romans. My experience is that the intense Pauline scholarship of the last 50 years made many preachers fear preaching Romans — too many theories, too many exegetical problems, too much at stake — so they preach on Galatians! This is even more true of Hebrews. Two problems for preaching Hebrews: the grammatical exegesis is a challenge and the relevance of the book to... Read more

Four or five major models dominate the landscape of interpreting Paul: the old / Reformational Paul, the New Perspective on Paul, the Apocalyptic Paul, the Beyond the New Perspective Model, and the Participationist Paul. In a book I co-edited with my friend Joe Modica, called Preaching Romans, all but the Beyond the New Perspective Model were essayed and then illustrated with sermons. In my reading that book can be a textbook introducing students to Pauline studies. At times, and more often than... Read more