To the Hebrews context mattered a good deal. Our own struggles to understand the use to which some New Testament writers put certain Old Testament texts may make us doubt that they cared about the Historical Grammatical and Literary context of a passage but we would be wrong....
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One of the frustrations I face as a biblical theologian is the confusion that biblical laws regarding the poor cause Christians who cannot tell the difference between charity and entitlement programs sustained by governmental confiscation and redistribution of personal wealth. This confusion is created, I believe by two...
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I find that political discussion with Christians and non-Christians alike often turns into a confusion between moralizing and good principles of governance. Many seem unable to disentangle their hearts desire for others from the desire to use the force of government to achieve that desire. Hence, being against...
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In two recent posts we began to discuss the implication of reading Genesis as an Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) Ancestor Epic, a collection of stories that a people tell themselves about how they almost weren’t, about their deliverance by their God to fulfill his purposes in and through...
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So, in a recent post I discussed the church’s first heresy (Judaizers/the circumcision party) who sought to require gentiles to become Jews before becoming Christians, or in addition to becoming Christian, as if a proper expression of Christianity is encapsulated in a fixation on the letter of the...
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