In this episode of our Anti-Judaism series we turn to discuss the nature and purpose of Israel’s election. Specifically, we discuss how this may have been understood by the Apostle Paul relative to the kinds of understandings that we find in the Hebrew Bible. Joining us for this conversation we have Dr. Joel Kaminsky, who is Morningstar Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of Religion at Smith College, and Dr. Mark Reasoner, who is Professor...
This past Sunday I had the privilege of preaching at my local church here in Minneapolis—Mill City Church. We’ve been reading through and preaching through the New Testament this year as a church, which in hindsight feels really appropriate in 2020. In this sermon I tried to provide a concise overview of the main issue in Galatians (Should the Gentile males in Galatia be circumcised?) and how Paul addresses it (Nope!). Summarizing a single text...
FREDRIKSEN, Paula. Paul: The Pagan’s Apostle. Yale: Yale University Press, 2017. pp. 336. $44.27 (Hardcover). ISBN: 978-0300225884. “Something is going on in Pauline studies.” So writes Paula Fredriksen in the closing pages of her recently published Paul: The Pagan’s Apostle. By “something” (italics hers), she refers predominantly to the emerging “Paul Within Judaism” school that renders “another Paul” in contrast to the well-rehearsed portraits of what she calls the “majoritarian Paul”—the Paul that became the “First Christian...
A few weeks ago, I was asked to write a supplemental reading for our Life Group curriculum here at Fellowship Dallas. It was an awesome week at our church where we baptized over 25 people who had made a profession of faith and had decided to follow Jesus. Being the nerd that I am, I chose a difficult passage where Paul alludes to the rite of Old Testament circumcision without much in the way of...
I am currently in the midst of that delightfully anti-climatic state of liminality that comes with submitting a PhD thesis. Of course, once you’re done with the thesis, you’re not actually done at all because you still have to defend it. And so, that means that I basically still need to be working on my thesis in a sense—at least in terms of preparing for the viva. Thus, with Galatians on my mind, I’ve decided...
Constantine Campbell. Union with Christ: An Exegetical and Theological Study. Zondervan: Grand Rapids, 2012. 463 pgs. (Paperback). $34.99. 0310329051 Campbell seeks to approach the subject “union with Christ” as a New Testament theologian, that is, his approach is exegetically grounded and theologically motivated. The first concern is represented by detailed exegetical work on the phrases relating to “union with Christ.” The theological concern is woven into this, but is then fully fleshed out in the final...
We came, we cleaned, we conquered. This weekend our small group, armed with Clorox and Windex, stormed the church, leaving no cranny unclean. For a few months now, we’ve brainstormed ways to become more engaged members of the congregation, and adding our names to the cleaning rotation seemed a good place to start. Saturday was our inaugural cleaning day. Top to bottom we mopped, vacuumed, dusted and disinfected, and by the end, the whole place...
“…you become better and better by looking for so great a good which is both sought in order to be found and found in order to be sought…” -St. Augustine “Ethics” means more than understanding how one should act in a certain situation in order to be free from blame. This type of ethics is sinful man at his worst, worrying only about himself. Dietrich Bonhoeffer says that this type of ethics started at the...
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