Download or Stream this Episode Some people just don’t know what to do with Paul. Browsing a bookstore will reveal attempts to pit him against Jesus, to make him the real genius behind the traditions we know as Christianity, to render the sayings of Jesus so that they fit his ideas, to render his career…
Download or Stream this Episode Most of us Christians in the twenty-first century have a strong sense, even if not a theoretical account, that the New Testament is at once the legislator of our imaginations in ways that unbelievers miss and an utterly alien text, emerging from a strange world and insisting on a life…
Download this Episode At the core of the Christian’s confession we encounter the claim “Jesus is Lord.” It’s a bold claim, perhaps even confrontational, and for the faithful it’s the beginning of a conversation, not the end of it. Does “Lord” mean the same thing when we’re talking about God and when we talk about…
Download this Episode In one of The Wire’s many memorable scenes, the older and more seasoned Vinson has a caution for the young gangster Marlo Stanfield as he aspires to dominance in the Baltimore drug-war: “Prison and graveyards are full of boys who wore the crown.” Marlo quickly responds, “The point is, they wore it.…
Download or Stream this Episode To speak the Bible does not always mean citations with footnotes, does not always come with a declaration that “This is what MY Bible says!” Those with ears to hear will also find, in the narratives of the four gospels, echoes. Sometimes a character in the story will speak a…
Download or Stream this Episode To the one who writes “Jesus is the answer” on the youth-room poster or on the bathroom stall, I reply, “Jesus is the question.” And of course, true to Biblical phrase-building, Jesus is not mere question but question of questions, demanding from the thinking faithful careful inquiry into history, theology,…
Every generation of the faithful must learn and relearn the vocabularies and symbols and narratives of the faith, and theology in an era of hyper-literacy demands different disciplines than theology did in moments when so few read and even fewer wrote. In his most recent book A Fellowship of Differents Scot McKnight frames the central…
There’s a story that everyone knows about the doctrine of the Trinity: there was this teacher in first-century Judea, Jesus of Nazareth, who preached the coming kingdom of God and ended up getting executed. Then his followers began to declare that he had been raised from the dead, that he was the Messiah, the Christ…
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…
Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory: A Protestant View of the Cosmic Drama By Jerry L. Walls 219 pp. Brazos Press. $19.99 Written theology, in my own experience with the faith, serves me differently during different seasons of life, and I’ve noticed that the benefit I derive from theology books is basically Aristotelian in character: the books…
How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee by Bart D. Ehrman 371 pp. HarperOne. $27.99 I doubt that he would ever admit it (he goes to some length to note that he’s spent eight years researching this book), but I can’t help but wonder whether Bart Ehrman put this book…
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…
Forged: Writing in the Name of God–Why the Bible’s Authors Are not who we Think they Are By Bart Ehrman. 265 pp. $25.99 (hardcover) Normally I don’t have to establish these sorts of things, but this book has me worried, so before I get to the book itself I want to assert these things: Although…