Ethics Daily picked up some of my blogging about what we’ve done recently in my Sunday school class, looking into the subject of Islam. Do pay them a visit if you have a few moments! Read more

I will be preaching this coming Sunday at my church, and the text I’ve chosen is John 1:1-18. I’ve devoted quite a bit of scholarly attention to that familiar and well-worn passage (two chapters in John’s Apologetic Christology, for instance), but in the past I’ve avoided preaching on it, perhaps out of a concern that I might not be able to resist going into more detail than anyone in the congregation was likely to find interesting. One subject related to... Read more

Jim Getz has posted Biblical Studies Carnival 42. Don’t panic, it is mostly harmless… Read more

I just had a brief conversation with another church member (he also teaches Sunday school) which managed in a very short time to touch on evolution, the dome in Genesis 1, JEPD and Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, and the perfection and knowledge of Jesus. The individual in question suggested that, if Jesus was mistaken about evolution, then that meant Jesus sinned. A couple of preliminary points before my main one. First, I have no interest in defending Jesus’ sinlessness,... Read more

The Biblioblog Top 50 for this past month (May 2009) has been posted. I didn’t do too badly, and am simply grateful that my status as a biblioblog hasn’t been revoked when most of my posts this past month have been about LOST, panentheism, and various other topics that may well be very interesting (I certainly think they are), but are only marginally biblioblogical. The biblioblog listings are always worth a look, even for those who keep an eye on... Read more

“The Discovery Institute seems to have given up on the pretense that intelligent design is a scientific enterprise. As in, this pretense is no more. It has ceased to be. It’s expired and gone to meet its Maker. It’s a stiff, bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn’t have nailed it to the perch it’d be pushing up the daisies. It’s rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-pretense!” — Cheryl Shepherd-Adams... Read more

Here’s a table of contents with links to the recent posts reviewing and interacting with Philip Clayton’s book Adventures in the Spirit: God, World, Divine Action. IntroductionPart OnePart TwoPart ThreePart FourPart Five Read more

The fifth and final part of Philip Clayton’s Adventures in the Spirit is entitled “The Theological Adventure Applied”. Chapter 15 turns attention from the natural sciences to the social sciences, which also raise challenging and important questions for theology. Psychology and anthropology both focus their attention to a significant degree on human meaning-making activities, and Clayton emphasizes that “The meaning project isn’t marginal: it’s at the center of our existence” (p.232). Yet the fact that “the construction of meaning is... Read more

“[C]ollecting stories is one thing and preserving their older meanings and contexts is another. The underlying idea in many Biblical studies of the conservative camp, that old memories were orally transmitted, unchanged through the centuries, is unrealistic and somewhat naive. Old stories must have absorbed different layers of realities on their way down through the centuries until they were put in writing.” — Israel Finkelstein, “Digging for the Truth: Archaeology and the Bible” in Brian B. Schmidt (ed.), The Quest... Read more

In Part Four of Adventures in the Spirit, Philip Clayton focuses on one of the toughest theological issues, namely divine action. Abstract discussion of concepts of God are perhaps meaningless, but certainly far less interesting, unless one can give some account of what God does, of what difference the existence of God makes. Chapter 12 begins by posing the issue sharply: theistic traditions like Christianity and Islam “have traditionally been committed to a robust account of the actions of God”... Read more