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Does the New Testament prescribe a particular form of church government for all times and places? “No,” many Christian academics have long believed. The New Testament’s materials on church polity are characterized by “irreconcilable diversity,” says Ernst Käsemann. Millard Erickson agrees, and then remarks that, even if the New Testament offered a unitary pattern, “It … Read more
Simon Wiesenthal was a Jewish architect when World War 2 began. He was imprisoned for four years in various ghettoes and concentration camps, and ultimately 89 family members were murdered in the Holocaust. After the war, he became famous for his work identifying and locating Nazi war criminals all over the world. Eventually Wiesenthal heroically … Read more
This paper is a synopsis of the author’s recently released monograph, Paul and Secular Singleness in 1 Corinthians 7 (Cambridge University Press, SNTS 184, April 2024). The present paper examines the social context that Paul was addressing in Corinth on the question of marriage and singleness in 1 Corinthians 7 and argues that contrary to … Read more
In what sense is Paul’s boasting language “rhetorical”? Following the seminal essays of E. A. Judge (1968) and Christopher Forbes (1986), the standard line on Pauline boasting is that he boasts to beat his opponents at their own game and, simultaneously, to reengineer the very concept of honor itself. In this view, Paul’s boasting is … Read more
In the wake of John Barclay’s momentous Paul and the Gift, many have begun to explore how grace is defined and deployed in other scriptural texts by making use of his taxonomy of the six perfections of gift—where “perfection” speaks of a particular quality of grace being drawn out to an “end-of-the-line extreme” (Barclay, 4). … Read more
Tertullian’s ethical (disciplinary) theology has been pegged as “radically eschatological” (Sider, 1982), specifically in regard to the motives pushing his disciplinary system. In fact, one commentator has claimed that “fear [of eternal punishment] and [selfish] hope [of eternal reward] are the only two motives that really matter” to the flamboyant Carthaginian (Rambaux, 1979). More recently, … Read more
Critics frequently take for granted that evangelicalism is a fundamentally American movement. Scholars of evangelicalism rebut this claim with reference to the importance of British evangelicalism, continental Pietism, and now global evangelicalism. A deeper exploration of the term, I argue in this paper, reveals that “evangelicalism” that has been more continuously grounded in Britain than … Read more
Overwhelming silence in the wake of public black deaths (i.e., George Floyd, Ahmad Arberry, and Breonna Taylor), the ongoing justification and public support for Donald Trump, and the attempt to maintain power through theological gatekeeping and public policy have highlighted the social ethics of the contemporary American evangelical movement over the past decade. As a … Read more
Critically examining 19th-century Mercersburg theology can benefit global evangelicalism today. While Mercersburg theology was based in the German Reformed Church, some see it as a combination of Reformed and Evangelical theologies. Others describe it as Reformed Catholicity. Specifically, this session will examine Mercersburg’s sacramental theology and how it interacted with the three dominant evangelical expressions … Read more
The subject of this paper is the rare case of a Chinese “reverse mission” to the United States. Witness Lee (Li Changshou, 1905-1997) was a coworker with Watchman Nee in his “Little Flock” movement in China. He became the leader of the movement’s Taiwan branch after 1949 and migrated to the United States in 1962. … Read more