Posts tagged as:

Old Testament

What about Anglicans and the Old Testament?

September 20, 2009

(This post is one of a sporadic series on the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles)
The seventh article stands within the tradition when it stakes a claim to the Hebrew Bible as Old Testament, and seeks to introduce some basic interpretative principles. These are, however, not without their problems.

VII. Of the Old Testament
[...]

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A little bit of Hebrew Bible help required, please?

September 17, 2009

I would be grateful for some assistance from any or all of you with more knowledge and bigger bookshelves.
With Ecclesiastes 3:5, does the suggestion that “throwing away stones” is a euphemism for making love rest on anything other than an inference from parallelism with the second part of the verse. I must say that even [...]

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Goldingay Preview: Quote of the Day

September 10, 2009

I don’t often do quotations, but this advance preview of Goldingay’s OT Theology 3: Israel’s Life jumped out at me.

The difference between God and us is that God never thinks he is us

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Bewailing her virginity

August 20, 2009

Today the first reading at Mass was the story of Jepthah’s daughter (Judges 11:29-40). It is some distance from being the most edifying story in the Bible, and even more of a contender for David Ker’s Bad Boy Bible study than Elisha and the bears. Coming up with a short reflection was made even more [...]

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Write off the Bible, why don’t you?

August 16, 2009

I can understand why Duane Smith wishes to treat Scripture both as needing to be put in scare quotes and as any other literary corpus. And in fact he has a serious and oft-unnoticed point when he decries the false dichotomy between confessional readings and a relativist free-for-all.
I am intrigued that David Ker wants to [...]

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Baldilocks and the she bears: is the cross non-violent?

August 14, 2009

In my initial response to David Ker’s bad boy Bible meme, I mainly asked questions, noting that my most fundamental answer was that I wouldn’t preach on this passage. At least, not in isolation, since its themes need refracting, and of course, in the Anglican tradition one would always have at least two, if not [...]

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Baldy, bad boys and the big bear: a strange Bible meme

August 12, 2009
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David Ker has followed up his bad boy bible reading approach with a reading of this classic story from the Elisha cycle.

From there he went up to Bethel, and while he was on the road, some small boys came out of the town and jeered at him. ‘Hurry up, baldy!’ they shouted. ‘Come on up, [...]

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Well, my opinion of Ben Witherington just went down …

July 20, 2009

… when I read his post today. He puts up a short video podcast about the book of Jonah by someone else (James Howell) and commends it. The podcast is okay, although I would say that Howell doesn’t draw enough attention either to the humour, or the presumed polemic against a narrow religious nationalism. But [...]

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Is the Hebrew Bible Not-the-Old-Testament?

July 3, 2009

John Anderson has a post on one of those perennial topics: what to call the collection of Scriptures that are common to both Judaism and Christianity? In the comments on that post Doug Mangum draws attention to a post of his on the topic from 18 months ago. Those who used to read my past [...]

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The final form of the text is not enough

July 1, 2009

Ken Schenk has started a series of posts towards a basic study guide of critical issues in approaching the Bible. The first two are here and here. Take a look at these as they get posted. As far as short introductions go, he packs a lot in, and his introduction to the OT Canon is [...]

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