Nathan Gilmour leads David Grubbs and Michial Farmer in a discussion of Rodney Clapp’s 1996 article “Why the Devil Takes Visa.”
Tag: Walter Brueggemann
The Christian Humanist Podcast, Episode #160: A Little Exercise for Young Theologians
David Grubbs leads a discussion with Nathan Gilmour and Michial Farmer about Helmut Thielicke’s 1959 treatise A Little Exercise for Young Theologians. Michial’s joke
Christian Humanist Profiles 28: Ice Axes for Frozen Seas by Walter Brueggemann
Cultural critics of a certain persuasion will sometimes suggest that the Bible is a force to conserve what is most stable in human society, to call us back from our radical delusions and into a life that deserves not critique but preservation without much question or disturbance. Not so Walter Brueggemann. In his famous 1978…
BrueggeBlog 8: It’s All Interpretation
Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy God-Verbs The Gospel of Plurality Theological Dialectics My Creatio ex Nihilo Copout First to the Jews, then to the Nations Mediation and Dispute and Authority It’s All Interpretation It’s funny how pendulums (pendula?) shift. In my own relatively brief lifetime (as I write this I’m 36), and as I’ve taught and interpreted…
Brueggeblog 7: Mediation and Dispute and Authority
Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy God-Verbs The Gospel of Plurality Theological Dialectics My Creatio ex Nihilo Copout First to the Jews, then to the Nations Mediation and Dispute and Authority It’s All Interpretation Many folks, if not most, start the game thinking that the question of Biblical authority is a zero-sum game, the sort that governs chess…
BrueggeBlog 6: First to the Jews, then to the Nations
Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy Okay, so I left a bit of a gap between posts 5 and 6. Sorry about that. For the sake of those who want to refresh themselves on the series, here are the episodes, both those written and those not-yet-written, with hyperlinks where relevant: God-Verbs The Gospel…
BrueggeBlog 5: My Creatio ex Nihilo Copout
Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy I’m going to appropriate and extend Alasdair MacIntyre’s notion of a tradition here and posit that to be part of the tradition of Bible-interpretation means engaging in the ongoing conversation and dispute over what it means to love the Bible and to interpret it faithfully. Such an…
BrueggeBlog 4: Theological Dialectics
Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy Up to a certain point, reading one book of the Bible at a time (or, sometimes, one segment of one book of the Bible) is the task at hand. Certainly I would say, as a Bible-loving sort of dude, that the reading of Jeremiah is always before…
BrueggeBlog 3: The Gospel of Plurality
Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy If the stories of the Biblical text are the core of the testimony (as I discussed in BrueggeBlog 2), certain questions arise: does the story of Job stand as the real core, and the story of the Exodus as periphery? Should we assume that Saul lost the…
BrueggeBlog 2: God-Verbs
Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy My own Brueggemann revolution started with grammar: the main way that Israel articulates the core testimony about YHWH is in the form of verbs. I’m not sure I would have arrived there on my own; after all, the church culture into which I converted and the theological…
BrueggeBlog 1: Back into the Biblical Theology Fray
Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy There are all sorts of good things about defending one’s dissertation. I never have to correct a student again when he addresses me as “Dr. Gilmour.” I got a little pay bump each month. I look like a peacock at opening convocation and graduation each school year. …
The Christian Humanist Podcast, Episode #51: Archaeology
General Introduction – The perils of Vacation Bible School – Introducing our guest – Listener feedback – Grubbsy’s new job The Topic at Hand – Indiana Jones, of course – What tools archaeologists actually use – Other people’s junk – Archaeology as destructive science – Slow but steady The Pre-Archaeological Imagination – Hebrew slaves and…
The Christian Humanist, Episode #29: Mentors and Telemachi
General Introduction – Reunited and it feels so good – Some talk about offices – What’s on the blog? Etymology – Mental? Mentos? – Turning to the Greek – Why it’s wrong to say “mentee” – Divinity enters in – A relationship between unequals – Grubbs goes allegorical Paul and Timothy – A new kind…
The Theological Datum Is your Friend: A Review of Walter Brueggemann’s An Unsettling God
An Unsettling God: The Heart of the Hebrew Bible By Walter Brueggemann. 212 pp. Fortress Press. $22.00. I first encountered Walter Brueggemann’s project as a senior at Milligan College, but I really became a disciple of Bruggemann’s in 2000 when as a seminarian I read his gigantic 1997 Theology of the Old Testament. Here was…