When the law appeared to promote the opposite of what God intended when it was made, then Jesus argued that it was important that people not follow that law.. If Jesus believed this to be true about Scripture, is it any surprise that he would have applied these ideas to his own teachings? Or that Paul would have done so? (more…) Read more
It turns out that the idea that there is a difference between the Jesus that everyone would have known and the version of him proclaimed after the resurrection (a common claim of Historical Jesus researchers) is a concept as old as the gospel accounts themselves. (more…) Read more
When my wife started to watch the show, she had expectations for many of the memes to appear in the actual episodes. She assumed that the dialogue in these memes was based, at least loosely, on actual things in the official show. Much to her surprise, almost everything she had already learned was entirely apocryphal. (more…) Read more
The Bible is neither mysterious nor straightforward in how we have come to read it. Human hands have both copied, miscopied, rewrote, preserved and reconstructed its many pages of ancient inspiration to the present day. (more…) Read more
If one of the creation stories of the Israelites could end up being rejected and replaced, why couldn’t the others? If most of Israel came to think of one of their Creation Stories as a myth, what stops that from ever happening again to a different Creation Story? If it could happen to Yahweh’s battle with Leviathan, why not the stories in Genesis? (more…) Read more
… it is not merely the case that God calls to us, as if God were merely a being far from us, but rather Caputo and Rollins identify God as the very call itself. God is not calling us to him (for he is with us!), but the very call is God in us, insisting us toward a new reality. (more…) Read more
The task of modern Christianity, as I see it, is moving forward with a healthier view of Scripture, one which seeks to both challenge the texts, but also to allow those same texts to challenge them. To do so, we must be willing to live comfortably with the fact that we don’t need to have all the answers to history in order to allow God to speak to us through those who lived it. (more…) Read more
Modern fundamentalist Christians who espouse the idea of inerrancy may not ever imagine that they have much in common with their old heretical foes of the second to fourth centuries, but indeed, the truth is that they have more in common than they would ever want to know. The same impulses that drive many today to seek out ways to harmonize contradictions in the Bible or ignore historical context, are all the same impulses that drove the creation of Gnostic... Read more
Today marks the beginning of week six of my first semester at one of the world’s premiere research universities. Six entire unbelievable weeks. Is it a dream? It might as well be. For over a month I have rushed from class to class, jumping from lectures centered on the Dead Sea Scrolls to focused seminar discussions on the Gnostic writings (and everything in-between). Aside from studying under some of the biggest names in scholarship (my advisor is the legendary John... Read more
The current position of the Adventist church is vastly out of step with its earlier traditions. If one were to take Ellen White’s old counsel to heart, the future of the Adventist church should be inclusive of all marriages, whether or not it chooses to officiate them or promote them. The question, as such, is not whether Adventism can come to accept married same-sex couples in its churches as members, but whether it will choose to do so. (more…) Read more
Biblically Literate: Exploring a Radical Faith with Matthew J. Korpman
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