The Logos Academic Blog
The doctrine of the resurrection has drastic implications for life here and now. If Christ was resurrected on the third day, then there are necessary truths which follow which should seriously impact one’s worldview. This article discusses how the resurrection is evidence of life after death which in turn should affect one’s view of philosophy.
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Dependent adverbial clauses are a common feature of Koine Greek, generally categorized based on the kind of content conveyed (e.g., conditional, comparative, spatial, temporal, reason/result, etc.) While many spatial and temporal adverbial clauses are evenly distributed before and after the main clause on which they depend, the same cannot be said of conditional clauses introduced by ἐὰν and εἰ. Only rarely are they found following the main clause.
So why are they not more evenly distributed?
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Plenty of Bible interpreters treat New Testament Greek the way my three-year-old girl treats my one-year-old boy: with well-meaning, blundering over-attention that ends up making him cry. Evangelical scholar and linguist Moisés Silva has a hilarious little piece in Foundations of Contemporary Interpretation in which he shows what this over-attention looks like by applying it to English (you just have to read it).
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Last semester I assigned the classic C. S. Lewis text The Abolition of Man to my New Testament Ethics class. Although it had been at least a decade since I had last read the book, I felt confident I remembered the book in the main from the multiple readings I had given it in previous decades, going back to my college days when I first read it. As it turns out, old professor Lewis still had a few tricks left up his sleeve. I had understood one of the main themes of the book, but had somehow missed something essential. I confess this because I don’t think my experience is unique. (See Michael Ward’s new book, After Humanity, for a contemporary example.) I think it likely that my failure to understand Lewis was something endemic to how we have understood the goals and means of theological truth, theological education, and spiritual formation.
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From ‘Moral Influence’ to ‘Penal Subsitution’ to ‘Christus Victor,’ Theologians and Philosophers Continue to Reshape a Central Christian Doctrine
by Joshua R. Farris | Missional University
The teacher might cluster atonement theories in two general camps. The first camp approaches atonement by searching for the view that best captures all the major aspects of Christ’s person, work, and ethic. In the second camp, one is keen to find that one theory implied by the collective mind within Christian history.
The first camp resembles a tool-box approach. Think of it as a collage, with different pieces that can be fit together in various ways. The theologian simply takes all the tools and tries to make sense of them as one whole with different parts, perspectives, or motifs. However, this approach is met with the obvious challenge that atonement doctrine occupies a central place—doctrinally akin to Christ’s nature (i.e., as both human and divine) and theology proper.
The second camp, then, attempts to meet the challenge of isolating a theory of the atonement that accurately reflects the doctrinal parameters laid out by the tradition. This approach is met with the obvious challenge that there is no dogmatic statement that determines for us which atonement theory accurately embodies that which is fundamental. Some of the most fascinating developments in contemporary atonement literature reflect these approaches.1
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Years ago, the first substantive biblical studies software I purchased was Gramcord. It was a hugely helpful tool at the time but has long since been surpassed by others.
Then, while doing my PhD, I switched to Logos and never looked back. The only problem was that, even then, I already had a ton of material that used Gramcord’s proprietary, non-Unicode Greek and Hebrew fonts (i.e., Greek Parse via Greekpar.ttf and Hebrew Parse via Hebpar__.ttf).
The prospect of manually retyping everything in these documents never seemed particularly appealing. But if you’re in a similar place, at least with Greek Parse, there’s an automatic conversion process that can handle most of the work in changing Greek Parse to Unicode-compliant text.
(And if you’re aware of a similar tool to convert Hebrew Parse to Unicode-compliant text, please comment with the details on this post. I’d be delighted to hear about it.)
After this automatic conversion, you might still need to do some manual cleaning up. But a few editorial keystrokes here and there is vastly better than either continuing to work around non-Unicode fonts or rekeying everything manually.
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Psalm Two’s familiar contents have made it a favorite among students, pastors, and scholars alike, as it has echoes of the Davidic covenant, eschatological hopes, and the promise of divine justice. The psalm is quoted or alluded to frequently in the New Testament, included within the prayer of the disciples after Peter and John’s arrest (Acts 4) and Paul’s sermon at Athens. However, while often and variously labeled as a “Messianic,” “Royal,” or “Enthronement” psalm, such titles overlook a critical aspect of this psalm’s function. This article suggests an alternate classification of the psalm as a “Prophetic Rebuke.”
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By James P. Chaisson, Ed.D.
After his resurrection, as he was preparing to leave this earth and ascend to the right hand of the Father, Jesus told his followers, and by extension the church universal, to go into all the world and make disciples of all the nations (Matt 28:19-20). Because the mission of the Church is to go and transform this world with the gospel message (Gal 3:26-29), Christian leaders must understand how to effectively interact with and lead people from a variety of cultural, ethnic, and socio-political backgrounds. After all, the world is becoming ever more interconnected with people from various backgrounds interacting daily.
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Jeffrey Tripp received a doctorate in New Testament and Early Christianity from Loyola University Chicago, and now teaches Math at Rock Valley College. He often incorporates statistical methods into his biblical research, which focuses on the New Testament narratives and their reception. Here he tells the story of how he came to rethink his position on the Synoptic Problem:
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By Jacob Cerone
Lexham Press has just made a significant contribution to biblical studies with the translation, editing, and publication of the massive 3-volume Strack-Billerbeck Commentary on the New Testament from the Talmud and Midrash. Every verse in the New Testament is illuminated with potentially relevant passages from the keystone works of rabbinic Jewish theological thought, the Talmud and Midrash. Jacob Cerone, General Editor and key translator of the work (also doctoral candidate at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität in Erlangen-Nürnberg) provides an excellent example of how S-B can benefit the research and teaching interests of scholars and pastors alike:
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