In my experience, Hebrews has provided a wealth of texts for sermons that call for works and human effort. Pride of place, perhaps, should be held by the Wesleyan doctrine of Christian perfection, for which one of the central texts is Hebrews 6:1. No matter how many times Wesley affirmed Christian perfection as a gift…
Dave Black writes about spiritual gifts and natural abilities. (Link on jesusparadigm.com, to make a permanent link available.) I like what he said. I want to add a note. You can find more of my comments on 1 Corinthians 12-14 under the 1 Corinthians tag on this site. The problem that I see commonly with…
Shortly after Jody and I married, I was approached by a member of our church. He had a demand. “You need to control your wife,” he said. “She says [fill in theological thing here] which is wrong! You need to straighten her out.” I was astonished for a moment, but went with my gut. “I’d…
Those who read my postings regularly, if there are any such, should know by now that I despise the algorithm Facebook uses to arrange my feed. Even the one that claims to be in date order isn’t. There is simply no Facebook reading option that I like. In addition, I agree with those who say…
Check out @dianabutlerbass’s Tweet: For #InternationalWomensDay— A favorite thread quote from English mystery writer and theologian Dorothy Sayers, from 1938: 1/ — Diana Butler Bass (@dianabutlerbass) March 8, 2018 I have always loved Dorothy Sayers, and this makes me like her more. Guys, if you’re wondering what annoys the women around you, read the whole…
When I talked about structure, I mentioned that I’d write a follow-up after my Wednesday night class. Here’s the rundown, though I plan to keep it brief. I’m indebted to David Alan Black for the basic note about the participles in this passage, and in a scholarly article I would need to cite a number…
Early in my college days I encountered a man who would have a substantial influence on my life. It started as he explained textual variants and alternate possible translations in Genesis 1 for 2nd year Hebrew. I’d taught myself that far, and hadn’t done badly figuring out the rules, but my knowledge was less than…
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…