One of the major themes of Paul's writings is the importance of unity within the Christian community. While it would be nice to think that this reflected a time when Christians were indeed unified, the fact that he felt the need to write so much about it demonstrates that it has always been something elusive. … Continue reading Unity as Witness: Ephesians 4.1-6
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
