Eric A. Seibert, Enjoying the Old Testament: A Creative Guide to Encountering Scripture. IVP Academic, 234 pp. Francis Bacon famously observed, “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested…” For many Christians, the Old Testament is like spinach: we know it is good for us, but […]
biblical studies
The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest: A Review
John H. Walton and J. Harvey Walton. The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest. InterVarsity Press, 2017. Some folks will likely be drawn to The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest (henceforth LWIC) because of name-brand recognition: this is the fourth installment in John Walton’s popular Lost World series. (However, in this case, the book is largely written […]
Bauckham’s Exorcism: A Review of Jesus and the Eyewitnesses
Richard Bauckham. Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony. 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2017), 680 pp. We’ve all played the telephone game in our youth. Whisper a sentence in your neighbor’s ear and they whisper it in their neighbor’s ear and so on around the circle. We also all know how that ends: […]
Reflections on the Gnu Bible
The online community of activist atheists and gnu atheists like to speak of their rational superiority to religious people. But the fact is that rarely have I seen such egregious, unchecked bias as I have among this group. I believe the warm reception that Peter Boghossian’s terrible book has received is evidence of this. (See my discussion […]
The Edsel of Christianity?
I have now completed Part II of The End of Christianity, a section which aimed through the essays of Hector Avalos, Jaco Gericke and Valerie Tarico, to establish on biblical grounds why Christianity needs to end. At this point I’d like to take a look back at the section by identifying a set of assumptions […]
What Gericke failed to do: A footnote to my review of Jaco Gericke
Terms have both a reference and a sense. The reference of a term is the thing it refers to while the sense of a term is the means by which it refers to that thing (i.e. it’s content). If Jaco Gericke is going to succeed in his argument he will need to demonstrate first that the sense […]
The End of Christianity? A Skeptical Review (Part 6)
“Can God exist if Yahweh doesn’t?” This is the question at the center of The End of Christianity chapter five written by Jaco Gericke. Some of the other chapters in The End of Christianity have bad arguments, and at least one chapter seems to lack an argument altogether. But the argument of this chapter is strange. Let me […]
The End of Christianity? A Skeptical Review (Part 5)
In the fourth chapter of The End of Christianity Hector Avalos promises to explain “Why Biblical Studies Must End.” I’ll engage with the essay in three steps: first, a quick reading of what I take to be the main take-home point; second, an observation on how the essay found itself in the wrong place at the […]
