Anyone familiar with academic administration, departmental politics, or faculty committee dynamics knows that scholars tend to have an immunity to effectively accomplishing anything. In Flannery O’Connor’s short story “The Comforts of Home,” Thomas, the main character, is such a person.  He’s a historian faced with a serious domestic dilemma that requires shrewd relational navigation.  It becomes […]

Deforming Divine Election A brief word about theological method. The narrative shape of Scripture must discipline our theological speech so that we speak faithfully of God and God’s ways with his people.  Our theologizing about any notion within Scripture must be constrained and shaped by the form of that notion within the narrative. Divine election […]

The Purpose of Divine Election We must keep in mind a second aspect of divine election in Scripture in order to see that it does not stand in tension with God’s love.  God sets his love upon a particular people so that they might be the agents whereby God swallows up even more people into […]

Divine Election vs. God’s Love Many Christians flinch at biblical talk of election.  It seems a dark corner of Christian theology that is better left alone.  It’s like God’s dirty secret that we’d rather not know about, the skeleton in God’s cosmic closet.  We’re afraid we’re going to find out that God’s heart is like […]

This week I’m going to re-post a series I wrote last summer about divine election, slightly edited.  Scripture uses predestination and election language throughout both testaments, but for many people these are confusing and troublesome notions.  They raise questions about the mechanics of salvation and doubts about God’s ways with humanity. Ephesians 1 is loaded with […]

*Originally given at Midtown Christian Community, October 9, 2010. I’ve always been deathly afraid of passages like Mark 13.  I grew up in an evangelical culture that would read passages like Mark 13 as wild and woolly predictions of end-times cataclysms, assigning biblical significance to contemporary events.  Back in the 1980’s, the big fear was […]

I picked up a collection of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories at Black River Books in South Haven the other day.  I’m also digging back into Galatians, so I read with interest Lou Martyn’s essay, “From Paul to Flannery O’Connor with the Power of Grace.” He compellingly captures Paul’s apocalyptic vision and the subversive power of […]

I’ve been enjoying James Thompson’s excellent book, Moral Transformation according to Paul.  He has a wonderful chapter on the communal character of the church’s moral transformation. Paul shares with Aristotle and the Stoics a concern for behavior, but he speaks with a totally different vocabulary, which is nowhere more evident than in the terms with which […]

As I mentioned a few days ago, I’m considering banning laptop computers from my classes.  If I do, here’s why. I consider seminary classrooms to be learning environments rather than lecture halls.  Most seminary students are already self-motivated people who can learn on their own.  They have access to much of what I’ll talk about […]

I’m working on my paper for the St. Andrews Galatians conference in which I’ll include a small section hoping to clarify that Luther’s Galatians commentary is more concerned with theological interpretation than historical description.  It is much more like Barth’s Romans commentary than a pure biblical studies commentary focused merely on historical-critical exegesis. Barth certainly […]