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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
Character ethics approaches have been increasingly applied to the study of the Old Testament. In the words of William Brown (2002: xi) a character ethics approach is “more a shared outlook than an established methodology [that]…investigates the formative, as well as normative, impact that Scripture qua Scripture makes upon reading communities, both ancient and (post)modern.” … Read more
Contemporary interpretation of 1 Cor 7:1-9 regularly speaks of marital sex as prophylaxis against sexual immorality, whereby the sexual needs of a spouse must be satisfied so as to prevent sexual immorality (7:2) and a loss of self-control (7:5, 9). This reading often assumes that Paul is both beginning a new literary unit in 7:1 … Read more
An important component of advances in recent scholarship on the use of the OT in the NT has been the increased attention given to the presence of extensive inner-biblical interpretation and intertextuality within the OT itself. As a result, many have recognized the substantial overlap between the kinds of interpretive strategies utilized in the OT … Read more
Critics of the Nicene Creed routinely characterize it as a Hellenized distortion of the Christian faith. Even N. T. Wright complained about the fourth-century church “trying to make theological bricks without the biblical straw.” This paper argues that the Nicene Creed is rooted in Jewish theology and constructed from “biblical straw,” especially proto-creedal New Testament … Read more
Luke’s portrayal of Judas’s betrayal is shaped by socio-cultural factors that magnify his land purchase, thereby accentuating both his alignment with elite power structures and his rupture from the communal ethos of early discipleship. In contrast to Matthew’s fixed sum of silver, the open-ended payment in Luke’s account implies a far more extensive payoff for … 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
This paper examines the claim that Gregory of Nazianzus, a fourth-century Cappadocian Father notably influenced by Origen, supported the doctrine of apokatastasis, or universal salvation. A contingent of recent scholarship assumes Nazianzen likely supports apokatastasis by quoting works such as Or. 40.36 and Poemata De Seipso P.G. 37:1010 (Batiffol, Kelly, and von Balthasaar) or associating … Read more
This paper argues that Theodore Beza shaped the trinitarian language of the Belgic Confession (1561), integrating scholastic precision into the Reformed confessional framework. Early Reformed theologians embraced a type of trinitarian minimalism, favoring biblical and creedal language over philosophical elaboration. However, polemical pressure in the latter half of the sixteenth century necessitated greater clarity. This … Read more