Download or Stream this Episode Biblical Studies can’t seem to figure out what to do with the Greeks.  One voice warns against Platonizing influences on Christian theology, and another calls…

Download or Stream this Episode When we read the New Testament, its epistles and narratives and apocalyptic visions give us a vivid picture of life, the world, a cosmic mission. …

Download or Stream this Episode “Two men walking up a hill/ one disappears, and one’s left standing still.”  Whether someone hears that first as a Larry Norman melody or, like…

Download or Stream this Episode The Gifford Lectures have always taken as their project to “promote and diffuse the study of natural theology in the widest sense of the term,”…

Download or Stream this Episode Twenty years ago, when I was in seminary, I read all about idolatry: I learned that it only became a meaningful category when Israel emerged…

Download or Stream this Episode “The best thing that one can do with a Bible is to read it.”  That’s one of the proverbial words I remember from my beloved…

Download or Stream this Episode When I teach the text of Job in college classrooms, what students will tell me before we start reading, with only a bit of variation,…

Download or Stream this Episode In his famous essay “On the Reading of Old Books” C.S. Lewis praises the texts of ages past not because they were so often right–none…

Throughout her long history, Christ’s Church has been united and divided by words. For that reason, our creeds and confessions often have mixed reputations: they are the pure apostolic tradition;…

What is a monk? The word evokes the image of a man robed and cowled, tonsured in the West, bearded in the East. It recalls the architecture of the monastery,…

There’s a lot of poetry in the Bible. Anyone who flips through its pages can see how many have that telltale jagged edge of printed verse. But it’s not only…

Stream or download this episode. When I was in seminary, in the first year of this millennium of ours, I was quite sure I was not an evangelical: I was…

Stream or download this episode. Late in his posthumously-published Philosophical Investigations, in section 373, Ludwig Wittgenstein presents a cryptic aphorism regarding grammar: “Grammar tells what kind of object anything is.…

Ask what principle Martin Luther put at the center of his Protestant Reformation theology, and you’ll get several good answers: justification by faith alone; the primacy of scriptural authority over…

Download or Stream this Episode I remember translating the opening verses of 1 Timothy 2 for a Greek class in seminary.  I had read the passage in English, and I…