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The Bible and Culture

I have received the following link from some of my more playful Catholic and Protestant friends. I can only say— “Prost”. http://www.professorbainbridge.com/2005/08/this_is_just_wr.html

It is indeed hard to believe but in the midst of all the sleaze and tease movies that are part of the regular junk food called summer movies there is a National Geographic documentary which is drawing large audiences this summer— March of the Penguins. Narrated by Morgan Freeman and filmed by a French crew…

One of the most prevalent topics in the Pastorals Epistles is money and its accumulation. Paul is especially concerned with how Christian leaders handle money and sees it as a litmus test of their character. Let us begin with 1 Tim.3.3,8 and Titus 1.7 which should be contrasted with texts like Titus 1.11, and it…

A while back my friend Dr. Ken Carter, pastor of Providence UMC in Charlotte sent me these staggering statistics. Here they are for your pondering. Fact # 1: In 1916, Protestants were giving 2.9% of their incomes to their churches. In 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression, it was 3.2%. In 1955 just…

Whether we like it or not, most of the valuable lessons we learn in life come from learning from our mistakes, including from the times we lose something we have highly valued. If we are forever protected from falling, we never learn how to stand on our own two feet. I was reminded of this…

One of the great imponderables for a Biblical scholar is trying to figure out just how Hellenized Jews were during the NT era. Put another way, just how indebted were they to the legacy of Alexander, which caused even Jews to translate their sacred scriptures into Greek and adopt Greek customs and culture? And what…

As I am working through 1 John, a variety of pertinent issues continue to come up, and certainly several come up from careful scrutiny in 1 Jn. 4.1-6. Our author is talking about testing the spirits, which is another way of talking about testing the source of one’s own or another person’s inspiration. One of…

I am in the process of working on a commentary on the Pastorals and the Johannine Epistles both in one volume. While dealing with the latter I was looking at 1 Jn. 3.19-20 today — “This is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in…

We all stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before us, especially when we are dealing with the life of the mind. And of course there have been many great schools of Christian thought and of Christian scholarship, but when it comes to Biblical Interpretation there are few if any institutions from the…

How many times have we heard the phrase “I cannot deny my experience”? This is all the more the cry when it comes to religious experience. But in fact the issue is not the reality or the clarity of the experience, the issue is the source, the content and trajectory of the experience. What distinguishes…
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