I think it is interesting that every year we talk about a war on Christmas. Every year, there is some story that makes the 24-hour news cycle, and we start hearing the pundits on television talking about the war on Christmas. It is normally about how some nativity scene in some city was forced to move away from a public park next door to some land owned by a church. And we call that war. If we think that moving... Read more

Can We Still Be Astonished? We are weary of astonishment these last months, are we not? The national news delivers so many daily revelations and disturbances, so many scandals and questions, we’re nostalgic for security, routine, even boredom. Then comes Christmas, the Holy Days in the midst of it all. We’re worn out. We want to be expectant, but we don’t want any more surprises. And, frankly, we’ve run the Christmas routine our whole lives. We know how the show... Read more

By Kaz Yamazaki-Ransom, a Japanese New Testament scholar. He earned his Ph.D. from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and his dissertation was published under the title The Roman Empire in Luke’s Narrative (T&T Clark International, 2010). His works have been published in English, Japanese, and Korean, including two entries in the second edition of Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (IVP, 2013). His research interests include Luke-Acts, narrative criticism, the New Testament and the Roman Empire, and the use of the Old Testament... Read more

Monogenēs once more. Kevin Giles Following the 2016 Evangelical Theological Society annual conference in San Antonia where Dr. Bruce Ware and Dr. Wayne Grudem publicly announced that they had been wrong to deny the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son, the word monogenes has become a hot topic. This word has become contentious because both Ware and Grudem said that they can now accept the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son because they have been persuaded... Read more

What does the book of Job teach us about suffering? In the face of suffering many Christians turn, almost instinctively, to the book of Job. Surely there must be an answer here! The book explains suffering. But this isn’t exactly true. First, Job is not a book to give anyone in the midst of personal suffering. It is a book we should study as a church and as Christians to be prepared for suffering when it comes, and it surely... Read more

In my New Testament cohort at Northern Seminary I have a bundle of very good students. One of our assignments is a book review, and I will post two of these reviews this week. This one, by Ben Davis, reviews NT Wright’s book on the cross and atonement The Day the Revolution Began. The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion[1] A Review by Ben Davis I Every Sunday morning, Christians across America listen to sermons from... Read more

Jason Micheli is a United Methodist pastor in Alexandria, Virginia, having earned degrees from the University of Virginia and Princeton Theological Seminary. He writes the Tamed Cynic blog and is the author Cancer Is Funny: Keeping Faith in Stage-Serious Chemo. He lives in the Washington, DC, area with his wife and two sons. When I first sat down on the plane, I did what any of you do. I began thumbing through the pages of SkyMall.  A musak cover of Van Morrison’s ‘Crazy Love’... Read more

In the new book Two Views on Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Church (ed. Preston Sprinkle), the opening essay is written by William Loader, a professor from Perth Western Australia. His view can be characterized as a bold, if not harsh, Bible approach, as a Bible dipped into its historical contexts, and at the same one in which he believes we have moved beyond the Bible — so, on the basis of the Bible’s teaching of love, Loader affirms same-sex relations... Read more

Beverly Gaventa has become an increasingly, patient and influential voice in Pauline studies. My favorite book of hers so far on Paul is Our Mother Saint Paul. A student and colleague of the architects of the apocalyptic scholars — like J. Louis Martyn and J. Christiaan Beker — Gaventa has been working on Romans most of her career and we are just beginning to get a glimpse of her forthcoming Romans commentary in her new book When in Romans. Here... Read more