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READING PAUL: THE TWO APPROACHES OF DUNN AND WRIGHT
In the past two posts, I’ve been writing mostly about the (capital P) Problem with the human race: what’s gone wrong. The Bible has much to say about that, much that is ignored in popular theology, which tends to focus on a mistaken interpretation of the Genesis 3 narrative. The biblical idea of human evil…
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TEXT AND TRAJECTORY: PART ONE OR HOW THE LITTLE PRINCE CLUES US TO READING THE BIBLE
I began this post with the intention of writing about text and trajectory on the basis of John 14. I’ll do so in the next post in this series. But as I got into it, I realized I need to clear some ground. Along the way I wrote and discarded material on the history of…
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DOES THE BIBLE HAVE A SENSE OF HUMOR?
Is the Bible ever funny? The question was put to me by an older friend. This friend had two worries about the Christian faith. One was that he would get to heaven and discover that there was no sporting competition there. He lived for his games and his teams. The second was that in heaven…
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JACOB’S LADDER: HOW OUR SPIRITUAL ANCESTOR GOT EVERYTHING WRONG
The Bible is a subversive book. It subverts our assumptions about life, about good and evil, about where God is and where God isn’t; it often subverts even what seems like the obvious meaning of the story it tells. Few passages are as subversive in this last sense as the story of Jacob’s ladder in…
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THE TOWER OF BABEL: THE DIVINE PREFERENCE FOR DIVERSITY
The intriguing, funny, and cutting story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9) is the last in the collection of stories that makes up the preface to the book of Genesis and, therefore, to the Bible itself. We do well to attend to these stories, not as histories, which is to distort them and lose…
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WHAT ABOUT THE OTHER FALL STORY IN GENESIS?
Fall stories are important (fall stories of the theological sort; not stories about the season). They account for what has gone wrong in our world. Perhaps, that’s not quite the right way to put it. “Gone wrong” implies that there was an earlier time when things had not gone wrong. But not all stories accounting…
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DOES THE BIBLE HAVE A PLOT? A Second Take on a Theme
A bit of clarification is in order. In my previous series, “The Quest for “A Foundation-Laying Biblical Theology of Human Sexuality,” I took aim at a number of assumptions and methods that underlie the approach taken to questions of human sexuality by a synodical study committee in their looooong (175 pages) and controversial report, now…