Category: The Bible as Literature

Scripture is clever. When Simeon stands in the temple waiting, he does so at the pleasure of his master. He has no agency, control, or personal expectations, yet he has a duty. As his very name suggests, he is to hear and obey the words of God until his death, trusting that God will fulfill…

Universities, schools, and centers of faith are giving up on knowledge and selling out. What happened this past week at Hamline University indicates a trend in which an agenda other than the mission to impart knowledge controls what is permissible in the classroom. Knowledge is not a popularity contest. A teacher does not share information…

Lies are comfortable. We lie to soothe feelings. To make agendas appealing, to sell things. We find lies so attractive that we bend our terminology to accommodate them. Instead of analyzing information, we discuss “narratives.” Instead of taking responsibility for our actions and their outcomes, we rush to share our stories and our vision. “The…

Suppose you ask an American what’s wrong with the culture and have enough patience to wade through people’s anger and cheap sound bites. You’ll find surprising agreement across all ideological boundaries: something is broken. Even those hell-bent on defending American exceptionalism will eventually contradict themselves and blame someone for why things are not as great…

During the Christmas season, when we use the expression “peace on earth,” we reduce it to a platitude, an absurd, utopian ideal where one day everyone will magically hold hands and get along—and then we congratulate ourselves for endorsing our correct view of how the world should work. We do this all the time with…

The Arabic expression mashallah, which means “what God wills” or “what God desires has happened,” may be the best chance English speakers have at unlocking the spirit of Luke’s use of the Greek term, eudokia. The latter also pertains to the completion of God’s will, what God desires by fiat, and his good pleasure in the biblical…

A thousand years before the birth of Greek philosophy, the forbears of the biblical authors inhabited a world in which the families of the earth coexisted in the land with different languages and cultures. In the story of Luke, as with the rest of the Bible, the author’s focus is not on identity, but locality,…

“Each tree,” Luke will soon explain, “is known by its own fruit.” (Luke 6:44) When Gabriel speaks the command of God, a prophet is born of Elizabeth to “turn many of the sons of Israel back to the Lord their God.” (Luke 1:16) Likewise, at Gabriel’s command, the Messiah is conceived in Mary’s womb, to…

When a character from Roman history appears in Luke, the worst thing any of us could ever do is go back to accounts of Roman history to try to piece together a timeline or historical framework against which we read the gospel text. On the contrary, when a familiar character appears, you can be sure…

At the beginning of Luke 2, the author sets up an artificial parallel between the Lukan “things accomplished among us” and Caesar’s “decree that a census be taken.” Insofar as both attempts at setting the record straight take place under the authorship of the evangelist himself, far from an account of Roman history, the census…