I want to focus on just one line of text. In 1 Kings 3:5, God tells Solomon to ask God what God should give Solomon. It’s a simple enough question. Most of us remember the answer. Solomon wants wisdom. God decides to give him wisdom and lots of riches as well. As I reflect on…
I’m pretty fond of moderation, even calling myself a passionate moderate, but in that very phrase, you might get the idea that I’m even moderate about being moderate. My moderation is not centrist, in the sense of trying to find middle ground on each issue. Rather, I believe in trying to examine all the options…
Ephesians is such a great epistle, but I want to just mention one verse: So then put aside what is false and let each one speak the truth to his neighbor, because we are members of one another. — Ephesians 4:25 The polite lie is a common means of keeping tempers cool. We do it…
The gospel for Proper 14B is John 6:35, 41-51. This isn’t an exposition of that passage, but something that passage brought back to my mind. Jesus starts with the bread metaphor. Now for many of us, comparing spiritual food to bread comes quite naturally. We’ve read this in the gospel many times, and we’ve heard…
… or use them more effectively. From The Assembling of the Church: … Instead, the church decided that they wanted to spend more money serving people and less money of a meeting place. Go read Alan’s post for the full context. Messiah Baptist Church is to be congratulated, and hopefully their example will be followed…
Out of the Depths is the title of a book on the Psalms by Bernhard W. Anderson, and an excellent little book it is! it’s title comes from this Psalm. There are just two major points I’d like to make about this Psalm. There is much excellent commentary about it, and the notes are worth…
What I do with Syriac would only be called “reading” by those who are generous to a serious fault, but I found the resource links James McGrath provided today quite useful.
I must be sounding like a broken record, but I really dislike mangled passages. It is sometimes possible to quote part of a passage and just hit the highlights. That may be required by time limitations. But when the changes made to the passage change the intent of the story, or make nonsense of it,…
Some readers may not know that I do my blogging in three main locations. Here at Threads, Participatory Bible Study Blog, and The Jevlir Caravansary. I like the three to have a generally similar theme with some graphic differences, and so I have just changed them all to the Atahualpa theme. This is a theme…
Darrell Pursiful at Dr. Platypus is requesting short definitions from those who accept or use the language of inerrancy in describing the Bible. Shorter, definitely, than the Chicago statement. Though I don’t qualify, even though my definition of inspiration has been called inerrancy, I thought I’d pass this on.