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The Theology of Paul the Apostle © 1998 Eerdmans xxxvi+808 pages James Dunn has spent over four decades with Paul on his mind. He’s produced commentaries on his letters and been one of the pioneers of the New Perspective on Paul. When you read The Theology of Paul the Apostle, his experience and knowledge of [...]

The gospel message is precisely an invitation and authorization to be freed from all … distorting, coercive pressures: to be freely and completely Yahweh’s own people, freed to live a life of unfettered worship, assured not only of safety from threat but assured of Yahweh’s own person, who is the true joy of life. —Walter [...]

I have been curious about Christian pacifism since the aftermath of 9/11. “Just war theory” had always been my official view, although I had no real idea what that meant. A few years ago the documentary, God of War, Prince of Peace was produced. (You can grab it for free on TheMovieBlog.com.) In it, Tony [...]

There’s nothing like a good word study to drill down to the underlying meaning of a text. BibleWorks 9 facilitates these studies in predictable and unusual ways. First, the predictable. There are 3 Hebrew (including my go-to, TWOT) and 6 Greek lexicons (including Friberg and Thayer) built in to BW9. To look up a Hebrew [...]

All Is Grace: A Ragamuffin Memoir © 2011 David C. Cook 240 pages At the end of Kubric’s film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Commander David Bowman left the ship to explore a massive black monolith stationed between Jupiter and Io. This monolith represented mystery and higher intelligence in the universe. As he stared full into [...]

God created us in joy and created us for joy, and in the long run not all the darkness there is in the world and in ourselves can separate us finally from that joy, because whatever else it means to say that God created us in his image, I think it means that even when [...]

The End of Eternity © 1955 Fawcett Crest (1971) 192 pages Reading 50 year old science fiction is an entertaining experience. Not only do you have to envision the future with the author, you have to view it through a dated lens. Asimov’s The End of Eternity is a great example of classic science fiction. [...]

Faith is the engagement ring which betroths us to Christ. —Martin Luther, Luther’s Works: Sermons on the Gospel of St. John Chapters 1-4, 334.

Chuck over at Terrible Minds threw down a challenge. Write a sub-500 word short story inspired by a randomly selected song title. Here’s my 481 word entry entitled, “Nothing (Without You)”. … I watch the drops of water arc perfectly off the tip of my ashen paddle as I swing the blade forward for another [...]

Old Testament Theology © 1996 Augsburg Fortress 318 pages This book is a godsend for those of us who don’t live close to a theological library. Patrick Miller has collected 15 different articles Brueggemann has written for various theological journals between 1978 and 1990 and organized them loosely into two categories. The first articles discuss [...]