Most of us have met believers sharing stories of supernatural encounters with God—or encounters with other spiritual entities. Perhaps it was a lecture from a majority world theologian or a missionary testimony during Sunday School. Meanwhile, biblical scholars and theologians trained at Western seminaries emphasize the historical “distance” between the world of Scripture and the … Read more
The transgender movement poses significant challenges to the evangelical church and academia. At the popular level, people with gender dysphoria self-describe using phrases like “being born in the wrong body,” “having a female body but a male soul,” and so on. Meanwhile, scholars debate whether gender should be construed as a biologically essentialist category or, … Read more
Traditionally, the phrase “hiddenness of God” has been understood as a philosophical concept meaning “a God who intentionally hides himself” in the historical context in which a person or event takes place. In particular, the biblical basis for this phrase is the way in which people who are in hardship and adversity protested to God … Read more
Mark A. Noll in his book, America’s God, explains that most of theological developments in early 18th and late 19th century are based on three specific contextual historical forces; (1) evangelical protestant religion (evangelicalism), (2) republican political ideology (republicanism), and (3) common sense moral reasoning (common sense realism). These forces are dynamically shaping Western intellectual … Read more
Theologians commonly appeal to Ephesians 4:23–24 in their expositions of human nature and the image of God. Is this an instance of irresponsible proof-texting, or a valid inference from the discourse of Ephesians? Indeed, there do seem to be good reasons to recognize an anthropological dimension in this text. Christian renewal is envisioned as restoration … Read more
Every death in Scripture conveys a message with purpose, and this study seeks to consider the function of the portrayal of Moses’s death in Deuteronomy 34. Lloyd Bailey has defined “bad” deaths as those that are premature or violent, but T. Desmond Alexander has countered that what distinguishes “good” from “bad” deaths is whether the … Read more
In this essay, I argue that John Owen’s views of the Old Testament’s inherent Christological frame of reference and the nature of the literal sense of holy Scripture can correct and guide our own reading of Scripture today. Though quality work has been done on John Owen’s hermeneutics (e.g., Tweeddale, Howson, McGraw, Knapp, Hindsman), a … Read more
Michael Norton and Francesco Gino’s groundbreaking article (2014) showed that many people today create rituals in the face of grief and loss, whether the loss is the death of a loved one or a breakup, the death of a relationship. It also demonstrated how a simple invented ritual in the face of a lottery loss … Read more
The conclusion of Jesus’ parables in Matt 13:51-52, in which a discipled scribe is likened to a householder (οἰκοδεσπότης), continues to attract scholarly attention. For example, in the same 2023 LNTS volume, Jesus as Teacher in the Gospel of Matthew, Nolland (“Discipled to Be a Scribe for the Kingdom of Heaven”) argues the image depicts … Read more
Charles Haddon Spurgeon could not escape his catholic reputation. After his death, biographers observed that, though Spurgeon was a Baptist, he was a servant of the universal church. With the recent completion of the publication of Spurgeon’s lost sermons, scholars have also discovered inklings of ecumenism present in the earliest years of Spurgeon’s ministry. These … Read more