I won’t present my discussion of Mike Bird’s book Jesus The Eternal Son: Answering Adoptionist Christology as a review, since I am less interested in summarizing the book with a view to help people decide whether or not to buy it (it is $2.99 for Kindle and so if you have the slightest inclination to buy it you probably already own it) than in getting a conversation started about its subject matter and addressing some of its key points and arguments.... Read more
The new theme in my Sunday school class is an exploration of “doublets” in the Bible, i.e. stories that are told more than once or events that are depicted in distinct ways by different authors. We began “in the beginning” with Genesis 1 and 2. The following Sunday we turned our attention to the story that is usually referred to as the “cleansing of the Temple” or sometimes Jesus’ “Temple tantrum.” I explained why I don’t think either designation is... Read more
Multiverse Science Fiction & Fantasy Convention Event Date & Location: October 15-17, 2021, Westin Atlanta Perimeter North Deadline for Submissions: June 30, 2021 Name of Organization: Multiverse Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention Organization Website: https://www.multiversecon.org Contact Email: Rhonda Jackson Joseph,[email protected] CONVENTION THEME: Multiverse Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention was formed from our belief that great stories don’t only come from the books and comics we love to read. Each fan is their own universe as well, with their own unique story to tell. Added together, these infinite stories create... Read more
I had the privilege of having a conversation with Prof. Sara Parks, author of a superb monograph on the gender pair parables in Q, hosted by Jonathan Stewart on the online podcast and video talk show TalkGnosis. Have a listen in audio format or watch the video below (or both)! Bart Ehrman kindly gave me the opportunity to write some guest blog posts for his blog about my book What Jesus Learned from Women. The first one has appeared and it... Read more
Thinking more about the language used in the two texts from Mark’s Gospel that were the focus of my post yesterday, I was struck by the broader implications of what is said about authority and goodness. God has given authority to human beings. No one is good but God. Others have power, even if to a limited degree. We can do things that God also does, even if on a smaller scale. We do not possess innate goodness in a... Read more
Working on an article about monotheism in early Christianity, I was struck as I hadn’t been before by the contrast between two statements in the Gospel of Mark, one on the lips of others who are complaining about Jesus, the other on the lips of Jesus complaining about how someone else has characterized him. Mark 2:7: “Why does this fellow speak in this way? It is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” Mark 10:18: Jesus said to him,... Read more
The questions I have been exploring in my public lecture are worthy of serious consideration, regardless of whether we encounter the real-life circumstance. Asking about aliens from other worlds helps us think about those who are different from us just in earthbound human ways, in terms of varieties of culture, language, skin pigmentation, and other such things. Asking about time travel can help us to think critically about our faith and worldview, or indeed assess whether we are open to... Read more
Future: Telling the old old story ten thousand years from now Science fiction sometimes depicts Christianity as it might become in the future, as well as futures in which there seems to be little or no place for it or memory of it. Such stories provide a helpful counterbalance to the tendency to treat our own time and perspective as normative. In every Christian denomination, someone at some point has drawn up a timeline of church history, typically reaching its... Read more
Present: Parallel Universes, Loving the Alien in Our Midst, and Robots in Church We have already been in the present in our discussion, and indeed we never really leave it. Science fiction may be usefully compared to prophecy, but prophecy isn’t really about prediction with accuracy. The point of invoking a vision of the future or of time travel to the past is to offer a message for our present day. Even when Octavia Butler offers a glimpse of the... Read more
My previous post shared the introduction to this public lecture. The first major section of this lecture focuses on the past, and so I gave it the section heading “Part One – Past: Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” I often tell the story of a thought experiment presented to me by a commenter on my blog, an atheist. His aim was to get at the issue of falsifiability, that is, the question of whether beliefs in general... Read more
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