Category: The Bible as Literature

According to the rule of the Lukan genealogy, the recent coronation of the English king was uncanny in its egregious assault on the biblical proclamation of the Resurrection. On the one hand, those who have stayed with this podcast over the years have (hopefully) come to understand that Scripture is a system of cancellation encoded…

If you are fortunate to live under the pressure of the Gospel, sooner or later, your life will be reduced to a showdown with the Scriptural God. You will have the opportunity to be embarrassed, admit your failure, lose face, and look foolish in front of the person who preached the word of God to…

Nothing is more painful than watching young parents explain their intention to raise their children differently than their parents or observing young mothers hovering over grandmothers, micro-managing their every move, scolding, correcting, worrying, overprotecting, and gossiping, all based on advice from their therapist or some silly blog post about the “right” way to parent according…

When hearing the Lukan genealogy of Jesus in English, it’s easy for people to adopt anti-scriptural notions of “king” and “priest,” developing incorrect expectations for how Jesus Christ will rule in the coming kingdom. But, as always, the key to hearing the author’s story lies in the meaning of the names. Between two Josephs, who…

The New Testament storyline places considerable emphasis and tension on the question of Jesus’s title. The Gospel of Matthew stresses that Jesus is an ordinary Ben Adam (Son of Man), while the Gospel of Mark shows him repeatedly insisting that people not reveal his identity as the Messiah because of their ignorance of his teaching….

In the first chapters of Luke, just as the Spirit moves from womb to womb, beginning with the angel Gabriel, the commandment moves from person to person, ensuring that God’s eudokia (his goodwill) is fulfilled—in the spirit of term—to his complete satisfaction. From Zacharias and Elizabeth to Mary and Joseph, and notably, the Shepherds of…

Sorting out one’s personal priorities is the most difficult aspect of committing to anything of value. Well, let’s qualify that statement. Committing to your priorities is easy when you measure value using money or self-interest. Everyone happily, readily, half-consciously, and with much pomp, fanfare, and self-justification explains how busy they are pursuing money, a career,…

When Christians emphasize the deep spiritual meaning or transformative power of human suffering, they unwittingly transgress the authority of the scriptural God. Yes, you heard correctly—no need to rewind the tape. For those baptized into the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Lord’s instruction, not human experience, must serve as our only reference point for understanding…

Theologians love to philosophize about the darkness in the world because, like politicians, they fancy the work of their own hands as a city of light set upon a hill. They see themselves as the administrators of light in a world gone astray. Nothing could be further from the story of the Bible, which shines…

When coming across a word, a phrase, or a passage in the Bible, our natural tendency as modern disciples is to interrogate a text and then assign meaning to it. If we can pin a piece of text down, it’s like having a part of the puzzle solved in our heads once and for all….