No, this is not a post about the crazy ways people interpret the Bible. It’s about the way in which people make precision difficult in communication. Am I thinking about biblical interpretation? Of course I am. If you have to guess what I’m thinking about and I don’t give you a clue, “biblical interpretation” is…
A weakness of a great deal of Bible study is in the failure to truly see the details. In our normal conversations we have multiple contextual clues including shared history and knowledge. When reading scripture, we have to be more careful, because it is not addressed directly to us, and we often don’t share those…
Dave Black comments some on linguistics and teaching biblical languages in a post today. (Check out the linguistics conference coming up!) The difficulty is the difference between teaching someone a language in a classroom and in discussing and describing that language in some detail as a linguist would want to do. Both the framework and…
Re: Linguistics and New Testament Greek: Key Issues in the Current Debate It’s more than a year away, April 26-27, 2019, but this conference looks like about the most fun you can have on a seminary campus without breaking the rules! I see several names I know, some well, and one Energion author, Thomas Hudgins,…
Dave Black writes on this passage today on his blog, as he prepares to teach it. I have extracted the post and put it on the Jesus Paradigm site (supporting Dave’s book The Jesus Paradigm), in order to have a permanent link. Dave argues based on the way one should analyze the phrases and then…
I don’t know how to get millenials (and other generations younger than mine) into church. The reason is simple: I’m past 60 years old. I hear frequent complaints about the failing of the current (or other intervening) generation. Is it possible, however, that they’re just as smart as or as good as my generation (or…
Last night I was watching the women’s Super-G. As the skiers made their runs, the commentators kept saying that it was incredibly unlikely that anyone after #20 was going to have any impact on who would be on the podium. I remarked to Jody that I wondered how it felt to be in one of…
I try to avoid posting partisan political material, but I am still an involved voter, and I will advocate on issues. I’ve been thinking about all the posts I see that tell me not do send prayers (which I don’t send to people, but to God anyhow) or thoughts, but to take action. (If you…
Our Sunday School lesson, which I’m not teaching this week, is from James, focusing on chapter 2. I’m not teaching, but in studying, I looked at a book I publish, Holistic Spirituality: Life Transforming Wisdom from the Letter of James. Bruce Epperly makes a number of important comments. I’m going to do a bit of…
On Tuesday I noticed a tweet, after comments on the Desiring God blog regarding women teaching in seminary. The answer was, not surprisingly, no. The men who do ministry should be taught by men who model men leading the church. Here’s the tweet: Men: On a day like today (@desiringGod), can you tell us the…
