The Logos Bible Software Blog
This post is adapted from the transcript to Dr. Daniel Block’s Mobile Ed course on Deuteronomy.
To a lot of people, the only disease worse than Leviticus is Deuteronomy. We don’t like this book, we don’t understand this book, we don’t get the point of this book, and we are glad that it’s not in our New Testament.
This post is adapted from the transcript of Dr. Mike Licona’s Mobile Ed course Philosophy of History (CS151).
Toward the end of my graduate work, I started to have questions about my faith. It wasn’t because I’d heard some arguments against Christianity. To be honest with you, at that point I wasn’t even exposed to too many folks who weren’t Christians.
But I wondered, “How do I really know that Christianity is true?” I had been brought up in a Christian family, in a nation that is pretty much Christian, at least by name, and I had only really been exposed to the Christian worldview. I had heard about other worldviews like Islam and Buddhism and Hinduism and atheism, but I really just didn’t know too much about them.
When we think about the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we often do so with an image or a set of biblical passages and categories in mind. Much like the score in a movie, those categories help us make sense of Jesus’ death. For that is what doctrine is about—helping us make sense of and understand who God is and what he has done for us, that we might better worship and serve our God.
But let’s think about that image a little more carefully—the image of a film score. Let’s say that you turn on the TV, and find yourself in the middle of a movie, but the sound is muted. Before you is a green valley, with a stand of trees in the background. What is the movie about? If the score is light and airy, a couple might soon stroll into the scene of a romantic comedy. If the score is the driving, intense music of Steve Jablonsky, the Autobots and Decepticons of Michael Bay’s Transformers may soon battle across the valley. The music we hear as we watch a scene dramatically changes our expectations, and how we perceive what is going on.
Some people will never tire of spreading a transparency of the text of Revelation over today’s newspaper to look for coincidental correlations, or of gazing into it as though it were some window into an as-yet-future (or in-progress) “seven last years,” attempting to “predict” how those events will play out in our world. This post is not for them.
It is for those who are tired of playing games with Revelation; who are ready to approach it in a new way – as Scripture – and to seek out its word to us in line with best practices in listening to the rest of Scripture. Because Scripture ought to be considered first and foremost as a word to those for whom it was written, from the Lord to give them much-needed guidance. I have found this approach lends itself far better to biblical preaching and to the difficult task of discerning the challenges facing Christians in their settings worldwide.
When interpreting Scripture, it’s all too easy to impose our own ideas onto the text, rather than drawing out what the biblical author and the Holy Spirit intended to convey. Sound biblical exegesis is all about getting back to the original author’s intent so we can faithfully apply the text to our lives, and the lives of those we serve.
On May 25, 2016, Professor John Webster, one of the world’s great contemporary theologians, suddenly and unexpectedly entered glory. Within hours memorials began to appear. Following his training at the Bradford Grammar School and the University of Cambridge (MA, PhD), Webster took his first teaching post at St. John’s College at the University of Durham. After four years he moved to North America where he spent a decade teaching at the University of Toronto. He returned to England in 1996 with an appointment to the prestigious Lady Margaret Professorship of Divinity at the University of Oxford, which he left in 2003 for the open spaces of Bonnie Scotland. In Scotland he served at the Chair of Systematic Theology at the University of Aberdeen until 2013 when he took up an identical post at the University of St. Andrews.
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This is a guest post by Peter Krol.
A reader of my blog recently emailed to say, “I was never intentionally taught how to lead a Bible study, and, when the time came for me to teach others how to do it, I had no idea even where to begin.” Do you know this guy? Does your church have such people, eager but directionless? They might never go to seminary, but I assure you they can become terrific Bible students and teachers.
In my town we had a radio station that called itself “the new 102.” The name was short. It rhymed. They added a catchy tune. Ten years later, they were still calling themselves “the new 102.”
The New Perspective on Paul is just a little like that. It started in the late 1970s and early 1980s, so it isn’t exactly “new.” On the other hand, contrasted against nearly 2,000 years of Christian interpretation, it’s just a babe.