Augustine called the Sermon on the Mount “a perfect standard of the Christian life.” John Calvin said it “collect[ed] into one place the leading points of the doctrine of Christ, which related to a devout and holy life.” Yet, for many Christians, the Sermon on the Mount is as perplexing as it is inspiring, giving…
Roger Olson, historical theologian extraordinaire and professor at Baylor’s Truett Seminary, is our guest on the first full episode of The Pietist Schoolman Podcast. Join our conversation as it turns to the crisis of evangelicalism and why evangelicals need to reclaim a Pietist ethos, why a Christ-centered (or, better, “Jesus-centered”) model of education is also person-centered, and…
The good news of Jesus, Messiah, Son of God. Thus begins the gospel according to Mark, and the notion of gospel, proclamation, announcement has been at the core of Christian confession for as long as there have been Christians. Yet that central news has given way in this historical moment or that, whether to an…
David Grubbs and Nathan Gilmour talk for a spell about the Old English poem “The Dream of the Rood,” digging into its particular extant texts and examining the strange and complex relationships the poem maintains both with pre-Christian English heroic ethics and with the gospel of John.
I Believe in One God By Pope Benedict XVI 157 pp. St. Pauls. $14.95 Believe it or not (and if you know me at all, you’ll believe it), I did ask Kristen, our press liaison, to request a podcast interview with the Pope Emeritus. The response from the publisher, in Kristen’s words, was, “You’re kidding,…
Christ Actually: The Son of God for a Secular Age By James Carroll 284 pp. Viking Penguin. $30.00 James Carroll tells a story of two wars against the Jews, two thousand years apart, that require an ethical response from twenty-first-century readers. Any such response that does not wish to ignore the truth of history, Carroll…
Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan 272 pp. Random House. $27.00. I’ll say this up front: New Testament Studies is a hard discipline. Its difficulty comes from the wide range of academic departments involved in doing it well. To dig in for real, one must have some facility with ancient languages…
Revised Common Lectionary Page for 7 October 2012 (19th Sunday after Pentecost, Year B) Job 1:1, 2:1-10 and Psalm 26 • Genesis 2:18-24 and Psalm 8 • Hebrews 1:1-4, 2:5-12 • Mark 10:2-16 When I preach this week, I’ll be using Hebrews 11:5-18, expanding the New Testament reading just a bit. I like preaching texts in which the vocabularies of the ancient…
Revised Common Lectionary Page for 28 June 2010 (Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Year C) 2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14 and Psalm 77:1-2, 11-20 • 1 Kings 19:15-16, 19-21 and Psalm 16 • Galatians 5:1, 13-25 • Luke 9:51-62 Once again this week, the lectionary demonstrated to me that, even having taught the Bible for fifteen years,…
Jesus Manifesto: Restoring the Supremacy and Sovereignty of Jesus Christ By Len Sweet and Frank Viola 201 pp. Thomas Nelson. $14.99 I sometimes wish that I’d gone into theology for my Ph.D work, but that does not mean that I think that theology is easy intellectually. On the contrary, like literary studies, theology requires a…