Should You Personalize Bible Verses That Aren’t Personal?

My wife is mad at me because I took away one of her favorite verses. Well, not me, actually, but Shannon McWilliams. Shannon’s teaching is usually derivative of my own, which is good because it keeps him from error. When he goes off on his own he tends toward heresy. On this one occasion, however, he went...

When the Bible “Clearly” Says Something

Interpreting Scripture is a wonderfully complicated endeavor because the Bible is a complex compilation of literature. Interpretation is art and science. It’s a craft that takes many years to learn and is never mastered. Beware those who claim to have mastered it. It’s rarely biblical scholars who make such...

Right Field Bible Reading

Right field. On every baseball team there was always a kid who had a hard time judging fly balls. This was the guy who was so fixated on where the ball was that he never could figure out where the ball was going to be. So the coach stuck him out in right field, where few balls are hit. (Right-handed batters...

Using the Bible Online

The Bible can be difficult to understand. Books have been written about how to study the Bible. Invariably they say that you should start by trying to understand what a passage meant to its original audience, to understand their culture, their history. There are literary questions to ask: what kind of...

The Incarnation Lens

In my last post I wrote about the relationship between the Old Testament and the New. In a culture that tends to value the new over the old, it’s not surprising to find that Christians tend to elevate the New Testament over the Old, whether by considering it to be mere background to the really good stuff...

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