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God of Our Fathers
Today I finished reading 2 Chronicles, and I’ve really been impressed by this book. I’m not sure I’ve ever taken it seriously before; after all, it’s just a repeat of 2 Kings, right? Plus it’s tied to 1 Chronicles which is up there with Leviticus as one of the most stereotypically boring books of the Bible. Wrong and wrong. It’s only with 1 and 2 Kings so fresh in my memory that the beauty of 2 Chronicles jumps out at me, and 1 Chronicles sets the stage magnificently. I’ve been chomping at the bit to share this all week! If I were N. T. Wright, I might have titled this…
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Meditations on Inerrancy (Part 1)
Last year’s annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) was focused on inerrancy, a doctrine I’ve always taken for granted. But following a fascinating panel discussion from the contributors to the new Counterpoints Five Views on Biblical Inerrancy, I picked up the book and let it sit on my shelf a few months. In that time I’ve been wrestling with my bibliology (i.e. theology of the Bible) in a disorganized and plodding fashion. How ought I to think about revelation (the doctrine, not the end-times book) and truth and interpretation and authorial intent and . . . the list goes on. With that in mind and with my project to explore…
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The Bible as Literature
I’ve been reading through the Bible cover-to-cover for what is in some ways the first time in my life. I read all the books of the Bible for seminary (even translated a few) and growing up we read through the whole Bible every morning, randomly jumping around from book to book. But I can’t recall ever starting in Genesis 1:1 and persevering through all 66 books in conventional order. It’s been absolutely FANTASTIC. I’ve been journaling through the whole process, but rarely blogging. And it’s killing me! Because this stuff is too good not to share. So my hope in coming weeks and months is to be more vocal and hopefully spark some…
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Horeb: The Mountain of God
I’ve been a Christian all my life, but sometimes things that should have been obvious before hit me for the first time. Today as I was reading in Exodus, the words jumped off the page that Moses wandered over to Horeb—THE MOUNTAIN OF GOD. This isn’t the first mountain mentioned in the Bible, but I can’t imagine any higher honor you could bestow on one. Moriah and Ararat were kind of a big deal, but this—THIS is the mountain of God. So I did a little searching to see where else this mountain comes up. The context I was reading was the appearance of the burning bush, which is already…
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How the World Works
Reading Proverbs this morning and it struck me how familiar all of it sounded. Be honest. Be generous. Be humble. Be of good character. But the funny thing to me is that each of these instructions is couched in the language of how the world works. Not perfectly, of course—sometimes the wicked do get ahead. But that’s the exception. These are the rules. Christianity is about redemption. Part of this means subverting the way the world works because it’s broken. But quite often it also means embracing the part of the world that is still good. I’m very good at seeing how the world doesn’t measure up, and that’s helpful.…
