Today we celebrate — I trust with great hope and expectation — the wonderful feast of Pentecost, which commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Jesus’ disciples. It’s an event which can be thought of in many different ways; even in the four years of this blog, I’ve discussed it in terms of the … Continue reading A Gift for All: A Reflection for Pentecost 2022
By the late 1970s, Christian theology and biblical studies appeared to be at an impasse. On the one hand, historical criticism in its various guises was still going strong; for example E.P. Sanders’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism was published in 1977, introducing the revolutionary ‘New Perspective on Paul’. But on the other hand, the Evangelical … Continue reading The Power of Story: Narrative Criticism
The past few posts in this series on the history of Bible interpretation have narrowed in on various Christian responses to modernity. Arising out of the Renaissance, modernity’s bold presuppositions, Big Ideas, and critical questions dismantled traditional European society. And, by the mid-nineteenth century, modernity had transformed the whole world in its own image. All … Continue reading Whose Text Is It Anyway? The Bible and the Postmodern Critique
I often reference in these Sunday reflections the sad and frightening state of the world. There can be not doubt that this is a difficult time to be alive; with all of the information at our fingertips about unjust labour practices, income inequalities, gentrification and the housing crisis in our cities, problems of waste disposal, … Continue reading A Word for the Weary: A Reflection on Revelation 22:12-21
In the previous post in this series on the history of Biblical interpretation, I introduced personal, devotional readings of the Scriptures through the lens of the monastic practices of lectio divina and Gospel Contemplation. Today we’ll turn to similarly personal approaches in the Protestant world. With the Reformation’s twin focuses on the importance of the … Continue reading “Hear What the Spirit is Saying to the Churches”: Reading the Bible in the Pentecostal and Black Churches
Matthew Root 