I frequently recommend reading the story of the exodus through conquest as a kind of connected narrative, trying to learn from the stories. The problem I’ve discovered is that many people skip over the ceremonial and legal parts of the Bible and thus often miss important narrative points that are interleaved with those elements. Ultimately,…
It is sometimes difficult to discuss scriptural issues involved in many modern debates simply because there is so little explicit liberal hermeneutic. It’s not that there is no liberal hermeneutic; it’s simply that so few people are aware of such a thing, and it’s so badly communicated to people in the pews. Moderates have succeeded…
I’m frequently struck by how often we deal with trivia in our Bible study. In some cases we might not call it “trivia” but we certainly are dealing with something other than the main message of the text–the stuff that is in black and white. We imagine what the characters might have said, we fill…
I’m not going to link to a specific edition on this, because there is no ISBN in the edition from which I’m working. It appears to be a match for this item on Amazon.com, and to be essentially the same notes as this item, though I cannot be absolutely certain. If you have a similar…
Since I’ve been attending a lectionary discussion group during Wednesday lunch, and therefore spending more time on the lectionary texts, I’ve been interested in the way the texts are selected. For this coming Sunday, Epiphany, one of the texts is Isaiah 60:1-6. “Now what could possibly be interesting about that?” you might ask. I’m glad…
Many of us have discussed the problem, as we see it, of young people leaving the church when they become adults, and sometimes–too rarely–returning at a later time. Sometimes people have complacently told me, “Oh, they’ll be back when they have children of their own, but it doesn’t always work that way. In this video…
I was impressed recently while reading several different blog entries about the importance of the way(s) in which we look at Bible passages. Now I certainly emphasize looking at the forest–at the broad sweep of Biblical themes. One way of looking at themes is in terms of trajectories–which way is the Bible story going. For…
I’m working on a long post on 2 Corinthians 5, but in the meantime, try answering some of these questions.
Via John Simons – Theology, Technology, and Stuff, I discovered the new location for Resurgence Greek (ReGreek.com). It’s now being maintained and further developed by Mars Hill Church. Resurgence Greek is not a general Bible study tool, but rather a specific tool for folks who know some Greek and want to be able to read…
Through my watch on the lectionary tag on Technorati, I found another excellent example of finding a new way of presenting and/or thinking about a parable. In this case it’s in a sermon about the Pharisee and the Publican, and the illustration has a Red Sox fan and a Yankee fan go to Cooperstown ….
