If the incarnation is, at its heart, about God becoming human, then we can see strong lines of continuity between how God was always oriented and what God became in Christ. God had an incarnational ‘impulse’ from the beginning.
Von Rad foresaw the dangerous consequences of the Church cutting itself off from deep engagement with the Old Testament. Already in 1935 he remarked that ‘the links of the churches with Old Testament scholarship have been almost completely broken for more than one generation’…
Most prominently, Jerry Falwell drew a comparison between Trump and Israel’s King David, and more recently, radio host Sean Hannity.
The not-so-permanent ESV Bible… The recent decision to make a permanent edition of the ESV has lit up the blogosphere in the past few weeks. The controversy surrounds both the language of their decision and the nature of their final few text changes, including Genesis 3:16 (discussed below). Crossway, who publishes the ESV, stated in […]
A core tenet of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic faiths is the claim that there is only one God, not that there used to be lots of gods until Yahweh emerged victorious.
Over the last 7 posts I’ve asked how we might read Joshua in a way that’s faithful to the story of Jesus. I’ve suggested at least 5 different facets of Joshua that give me hope for that possibility.
Yesterday the church celebrated its founding linguistic event—Pentecost—an event that many hail as the definitive reversal of Babel. Whereas at Babel, God confused languages, at Pentecost, God brought people of all languages together and united them. At Babel tongues were confused. At Pentecost, tongues were understood. You get the idea.
Worship as Warfare The book of Chronicles tells of a story where King Jehoshaphat of Judah faced an enemy coalition of some 2 million soldiers, or just a few shy of modern China’s active military. The story is clearly engaging in some hyperbole, since the size of this army alone is well beyond all human population […]
In his 2003 essay on Joshua in the book Show Them No Mercy, Tremper Longman III draws an enlightening yet disturbing comparison between the extremist ideology of Osama bin Laden and that expressed in the herem (total) texts of Deuteronomy and Joshua…
I think there are two quite different stories of conquest in the book. The story of Jericho belonged to only one tradition of story telling. Another existed, and it needs to be heard.