Michael F. BirdI will never forget 2004, the year when Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ came out at the cinemas. Before its release, Jewish groups protested the film on the grounds that it would contain anti-Semitism and amplify anti-Jewish rhetoric from the...
Is there such a thing as evangelical theology (emphasis on the modifier, evangelical)? Whether a theology can be evangelical is a disputed idea. Much of the confusion has to do with imprecise definitions of both evangelical and theology. I hope to...
One of the distinguishing features of Jesus’s teaching was the role he assigned to love. For Jesus, love was the summation of all that the Torah taught, as well as that which marked out his disciples as belonging to the kingdom of God. One...
Is Christianity a servile and womanish religion? It is somewhat ironic that today people sometimes dismiss Christianity as too patriarchal, whereas the ancient Romans reviled the churches as too womanish. They accused Christianity of being for the...
Our Western world is Christian enough to grasp that words like sin, repentance, and redemption are technical Christian terms. But it is post-Christian enough to not understand what those words mean within the storyline of Scripture or within a...
The Olivet Discourse is found in Matthew 24–25, Mark 13, and Luke 21. This famously difficult speech by Jesus is, at minimum, a prophecy against the Jerusalem temple. But others also see here a prophecy of Jesus’s second coming as judge of the world...
The only thing taller than the Burj Khalifa is the stack of books I’m currently intending to read. I like to read. I like to read fiction, non-fiction, cookbooks, news stories, human interest pieces, jokes, and Twitter threads. I like to read the...
I’ve recently been teaching a course titled The History of Heresy, which my students have seen as an incredibly fun and informative way to learn about the formation and defense of Christian orthodoxy. We covered the good, the bad, and the ugly of...
Joan Osborne’s 1995 pop hit What If God Was One of Us? asked an excellent question. Another song, Hark! The Herald Angels Sing—a famous hymn of Charles Wesley and George Whitefield—gives the correct answer. The ancient world had many deities, even...
Over the course of history, theologians, commentators, preachers, and readers of the Bible have pondered what it means to be justified by faith in Christ, as Paul says in Galatians 2:16 (LEB). There are several knots that we have to untie when it...
Among the divine attributes, none is so mysterious and sublime as that of divine holiness. In systematic theology, the divine attributes—aspects of God’s character and being—are normally divided into two categories: the incommunicable and the...
Revolutions are by their very nature destructive and disruptive. Revolutions bring old things down and erect new institutions and networks in their place. Revolutions bring conflict. They trample down things once thought sacred and raise up new...
Is the Trinity a holy hierarchy, a triarchy, with God the Father as the boss, Jesus as his deputy, and the Holy Spirit as the Son’s assistant or delegate? The short answer is no. Historical Christianity—whether Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant—has...
When I tell people that I’m a seminary professor—or, more precisely, a biblical scholar, I get all sorts of weird looks and remarks. Among those persons from a non-religious background, or else who are virulently anti-religious, I often get...
Across the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments, the concept of “righteousness” is incredibly important. To begin with, concerning God’s character, God is the one who “judges the world with righteousness; he judges the peoples with equity” (Ps...
The information age is changing how we deliver teaching and learning in seminary education. Accordingly, our pedagogy needs to catch up with the technology and the needs of our students. My mind changed on this very slowly and very reluctantly, but...
This article was originally part of The Paul Page, a site dedicated to academic study of the apostle, with special focus on the work of N.T. Wright. About this Bibliography This bibliography is my collection, annotation, and contribution to the...