Articles
In my first post as an official B4NP “Nerd in Residence”, I wrote that I’ll be introducing you to the various contexts that I try to keep in mind as I study ancient Israel and the Hebrew Bible. We started with cultural context, which primarily uses archaeology to illuminate the […]
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Progressive No More: Brief Thoughts on Adaptive Christianity
A confession: I’ve never taken to the term “progressive” Christianity. A bit too highhanded and dismissive for my tastes, even […]
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Digging into Cultural Context
As both a Hebrew Bible scholar and archaeologist, I enjoy engaging in conversations related to ancient Israel as seen in […]
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What the Gospels Teach Us About Salvation
What did Jesus’s death life do: Part 2 In my last blog post, I argued that we would understand salvation […]
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Why We Should Not Redeem ‘Fundamentalist Evangelicalism’
Note: This is a response to Alisa Childers’ recent article at The Gospel Coalition, “Why We Should Not Redeem ‘Deconstruction‘.” […]
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Why Paul’s Letters Are Inadequate for Understanding Salvation
What did Jesus’s death life do: Part 1 A couple of months ago, I hopped on the podcast with Pete […]
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Our (Weird) Heavens Are (Also) Telling Us about God
So here is our thought for the day: how we see the world around us and how we see God […]
Continue ReadingRecently, I wrote about the challenge we face when we are taught to “do what the Bible says,” as though it is a rulebook. Specifically, I wrote about the challenges of genre, context, and authority. I ended with this: “ All that to say, when we ignore these challenges of […]
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Why Do We Thank God for Things?
When my son was 5 or so, we were watching TV and a commercial came on giving aid to starving […]
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Be Curious
One of the areas in parenting where fear fights curiosity the most is in regard to faith. I remember correcting […]
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Exchanging a Leather Bound God for an Imperfect Bible
“I don’t know what to do with the Bible anymore” is a refrain that too many of us have come […]
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Reading from the End (with children)
Hannah (an alias) is an undiscerning fan of R-rated literature. Granted, the exclusive focus of this compulsive vice is her […]
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The Learning Human Jesus and the Human Bible
I am especially delighted to write this piece for the Bible for Normal People social media outlet, since there is […]
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Rainbows, Gold Lamé, and Jesus
What This Evangelical Mom Learned at her First Pride I attended my first Pride festival in 2019, and no one […]
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Top 10 B4NP Podcast Episodes of All Time
As you’ve probably heard, we’re moving to our bi-weekly podcast schedule for the summer. Just in case you’ll miss us, […]
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A Missing Angle on the Evangelical Struggle with Evolution
Protestant Evangelical theology continues to struggle with the fact of evolution. Why? One reason is that the groundwork of Evangelical […]
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Relationship Status with the Rules in the Bible: It’s Complicated
I find so many Christians who have a complicated and inconsistent relationship with moral rules. I have found that’s partly […]
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Does Your God Recycle?
This blog post is taken, more or less as is, from my book How The Bible Actually Works. You can […]
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Doubt: It’s Not Cool or Hipster, but Sacred
Being “saved” by God is an ongoing process of growth and transformation, of dying and rising, of being “conformed to […]
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The Bible Really Isn’t About “History,” Really
So, here’s the thing. When we read any piece of literature that deals with the past, we are actually dealing […]
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