Now that we’re half way through our study of Ephesians, I thought I’d do something different to wrap up the first half and prepare us for the second. What I’d like to do is a targum, an extended paraphrase of the Scriptures applied to contemporary circumstances. This is an ancient rabbinic practice, but has been … Continue reading A Targum on Ephesians 1-3
It is customary for Paul’s letters to begin with an often dense exploration of the theological themes that he will unpack in the rest of the text. In this way, Ephesians is no exception, as 1.3-14, the passage we’ll look at today (and in the next few posts), is a single, complicated, two-hundred-word sentence in … Continue reading Blessing God: Ephesians 1.3-14
After what has been a long journey through general human and Christian vocations and the callings to maturity and individuation, we come at last to a discussion of the specific ways we are able to live out our callings in practical, day-to-day life. In each of the previous posts, we’ve seen that all of the … Continue reading Called to Contribute
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
Over the past two thousand years, Christians have interpreted their Scriptures in many different ways. These different interpretive methods and traditions didn’t arise out of nowhere, however. For the most part, Christians have used the methodologies of the cultures in which they’ve lived. But, they have also done this within an interpretive trajectory that began … Continue reading ‘As it is written’: How the New Testament reads the Bible
Matthew Root 