The Logos Academic Blog
Dr. Michael F. Bird | Ridley College
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 several observations over the last decade have convinced me that we need to adapt to a fluid learning environment.
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The Pastoral Epistles have long been regarded as wise instruction for the benefit of the church. But in the last two centuries these texts have often been sidelined in the academy due to suspicions of pseudepigraphal (false) authorship and seemingly negative sentiments towards women. On the other hand, the 21st century has seen numerous detailed commentaries that are a harbinger of renewed interest.
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We read and study the Bible in the original languages. That is a non-negotiable. Hebrew and Greek are as fundamental to the work of the scholar and preacher as a hammer in a toolkit. We use the original languages in our day-to-day workflow, including our digital resources. A new tool in Logos helps you do just that.
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In the following interview, Scott Mackie speaks about his recent publication with T&T Clark, The Letter to the Hebrews: Critical Readings (T&T Clark Critical Readings in Biblical Studies; London: Bloomsbury, 2018). Scott is a passionate and lifelong student of Hebrews, having written numerous scholarly articles on the letter over his career. He is perhaps the best living guide for this NT letter known so well for its rich metaphors and use of the OT. Below, Scott describes the greatest influences in his own scholarship on Hebrews and the value of his Critical Readings to your own research.
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The Thessalonian correspondence has become of more interest to scholars in recent years for several reasons. First Thessalonians is considered one of the earliest—if not the earliest—extant documents of the New Testament. Also, both letters emphasize early Christian interest in eschatology. Several excellent commentaries on the Thessalonian letters have been produced over the years, but the last decade has seen a notable surge of strong scholarship on these texts.
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By Brent Niedergall | Youth Pastor, Catawba Springs Christian Church
Sermon preparation is best performed behind a towering stack of commentaries and lexicons (physical or virtual) where one can grapple with diverging views on theology, interpretation, and the meaning of words. Understanding how a word is used in a passage is a fundamental of exegesis. And the highest authority you can appeal to in New Testament study is BDAG. When the commentators are in disunity, you can always flip through BDAG and hope it cites the passage you’re studying. There you’ll find column after column of carefully arranged entries filled with definitions, glosses, explanations, and citations as supporting evidence. The data all looks rather impressive, but as the Bible student eventually comes to realize, selecting the correct sense is a balance of art and science. There are options. But what if there was a lexicon that required less art and more science?
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For decades, N. T. Wright has written groundbreaking works that have reshaped our understanding of the earliest Christians. And now it all culminates in his latest release: a 900+ page, definitive overview of the New Testament as seen through first-century eyes.
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This short Pauline epistle has long fascinated scholars, especially the so-called “Christ Hymn” (2:6-11), offering the possibility that Paul embedded here a piece of liturgy or tradition from earliest Christianity (or Paul proves himself here a poet as well as a theologian). More recently, attention has turned to Paul’s shaping of Christian identity, his attitude towards his own Jewish identity and his pre-Christ past, and how he teaches the Philippians to navigate their life together in a potentially hostile context. Exegetical and theological wisdom is widely available in existing commentaries.
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by Rev Dr. David Instone-Brewer, Cambridge
We tend to read the OT as though God is the only spiritual being, and at the first hint of plurality (e.g., “let us create”) we look ahead to Jesus. There are of course “strange bits” like Psalm 82 and Job 1, but these can be ignored. In the NT things become a bit more complex, with Satan, demons, and angels, and we assume that these will somehow explain the strange bits of the OT.
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Inviting Students to Confront Their Misrepresentations About Jesus
Michael Kibbe | Great Northern University
“The Gospel of Mark can be summed up in two words: Rome wins.” I speak these words about sixty minutes into my first hermeneutics session of every semester. It’s a sophomore-level general education course at an evangelical liberal arts university, and since the students have already had OT and NT survey on top of whatever church/Christian education background they possess, the biblical literacy rate is reasonably high. But whatever perspective they’ve come in with about the story of Jesus, “Rome wins” probably isn’t it.1
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