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 […]
Eric Seibert
Reckoning with the Peaceable Kingdom: A Review of Disarming the Church
Eric A. Seibert. Disarming the Church: Why Christians Must Forsake Violence to Follow Jesus and Change the World. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2018.) Carl Norden was a devout Christian. So when he developed the Norden bombsight, it was with the intent of increasing the accuracy of aerial bombing to the end of decreasing the resulting collateral damage wrought […]
Crucify! Crucify! The standard evangelical response to the Christian provocateur?
A couple years ago I reviewed Christian Bible scholar Eric Seibert’s book The Violence of Scripture here. Next, I published a print interview with Eric. A year later, I interviewed Eric again in my podcast. Eric is a profound, admirably honest, compassionate and provocative Christian scholar. The word “provocateur” can mean simply one who provokes, in which […]
Hell, right doctrine, and right character
In my recent interview with Robin Parry on universalism, Robin observed that Christians should want universalism to be true. Indeed, he put the point rather provocatively when he declared, “You’d have to be a psychopath not to want [universalism] to be true.” Psychopath?! Them’s fightin’ words! That might seem like a daring statement, but as Parry […]
31. Eric Seibert on biblical violence and the Canaanites
If there was one thing drilled into me growing up in the church, it is that the Bible is “The Good Book”. And “good” meant, among other things, morally good. So throughout years of Sunday school I never thought twice about the mass drowning of men, women, children and animals in the Noahic flood. I never […]
Violence and the Good Book: My interview with Eric Seibert
A few weeks ago I published a review of the book The Violence of Scripture (Fortress, 2012) by Eric Seibert, Professor of Old Testament at Messiah College. After reviewing the book I invited Dr. Seibert to submit to the rigors of an interview and he kindly obliged. What follows is an interview conducted by way of emailed questions […]