Biblical Decision Making

My previous post, Does the Bible Condone Slavery?, has produced some interesting responses, and one very valid question is just how I think the Bible should be used in making decisions. I’m going to try to keep this brief, but I’m not very good at that, so bear with me!

The most common analogy [...]

Tradition Criticism

Tradition criticism is an overview method that encompasses all four of the critical tools I have discussed previously, textual, form, source, and redaction criticism. Tradition criticism differs in that it is an overview process of studying the entire history of the text, looking for ways in which the expressed tradition has changed, and the [...]

Does the Bible Condone Slavery?

Ed Brayton, on his blog Dispatches from the Culture Wars, started a bit of an exchange over slavery and the Bible with his post Slavery and the Bible, which was answered over on In The Agora by Eric Seymour in his post Does the Bible condone slavery?. Just so you have the whole story, [...]

Redaction Criticism

After discussing Form Criticism and Source Criticism, Redaction Criticism is really quite easy to deal with. Redaction is simply another term for editing. It is the study of how an editor works the sources he has into a final document, the document that we would commonly refer to as the autograph. Again, it is [...]

The Locus of Biblical Inspiration

I was doing my morning reading a couple of days ago from the book of Hebrews. One of the verses that caught my eye this time was Hebrews 2:6-9, and particularly verse 7, quoted from Psalm 8:5 (all verse numbers from the English Bible, Psalm 8:5 is 8:6 in Hebrew). Now this quotation is [...]

Identifying Your Gifts and Service

Identifying Your Gifts and Service is a workbook that I wrote, which is published by my publishing company, Energion Publications. I’m going to write here about how to use that workbook effectively in helping church members understand their spiritual gifts and put them to use in support of the church’s mission.

Identifying Your Gifts [...]

Source Criticism

[Note, 3/25/06 -- the original post was truncated due to a syntax error I made in the HTML. This is the corrected version.]

(Continuing my series on Biblical criticism, from my last post From Criticism.)

If Form Criticism can properly be called a “tree method” rather than a forest view, Source Criticism might [...]

We’re Supporting What?

Over on the evangelical outpost Joe Carter is blogging about the situation in Afghanistan, where Abdul Rahman is awaiting sentencing for converting to Christianity.  Read the full story from Cybercast News Service here.  You can review the Afghan constitution and see just why this is possible.

This story is bringing to people’s attention just [...]

The Unforgivable Sin

The Wesley Daily has posted an entry by Jason Woolever (post-methodist) entitled The Unforgivable Sin. If you read this blog regularly,or if you look over the entries right now, you’ll realize that I don’t post something that just says, “Go look!” all that often, but this is the time for an exception.

This is [...]

Examples of Textual Issues in Translation

One issue that is commonly neglected in comparing Bible translations is the text used. Translators are well aware that differences in translation can be the result of differences in the text used, but in modern times, the approach to the text used by most translations has been very similar, and thus tends to be [...]