Gavin (at Otagosh) posted a fairly long response to my piece Biblical marriages. Since he took the trouble to reply at some length as a post, I’ll do the same. His critique starts Then Tim makes an amazing statement: “In terms of the teaching of Scripture it is clear that Gen 2 is a privileged [...]
Browsing Posts in Bible: NT
I have read the Bible professionally, and encouraged and taught others to read it, in three continents. The situations differed, including an African and a Western University, a Baptist theological college and a Bible School in a refugee camp. I have also supervised some exciting theses that develop interesting perspectives on understanding the Bible. So [...]
Rick Brannan has a really interesting post in which he begins to explore James and Cohesion. Most interesting to me was that he uses the Louw-Nida semantic domains rather than just lexical repetition (this first post was only concerned with the area of cohesion mediated by lexical or semantic repetition – or “semantic chains”1 This [...]
See also: Jesus and talk of God as father (part one) When thinking about Jesus’ talk of God as father it is useful to examine how, in fact, he pictured God the Father. What did he mean by calling God ‘father’? To set this question in context it is helpful to consider the cultural stereotypes [...]
David Lamb has a fine rant: I hate Study Bibles. Here’s the heart of it: Study Bible comments are kind of like stuff on the internet. Sometimes the information is good, sometimes it’s junk. But at least when you go to the internet, you know you’re going to find some junk. You don’t expect to [...]
At present I’m thinking and talking a lot about Jesus’ talk of God as father, and whether this naming of God means that Christians cannot think of God as (also) motherly. The Old Testament used both father and mother-language to speak about God, but it used both seldom. Language such as shepherd, kinsman-redeemer, king, rock, [...]
Previous posts about biblical teaching on family ( What is a family? and Does the Bible present a preferred pattern of family) led to lively discussion. How do we use the Bible rightly to establish teaching on family? This post addresses two aspects. The Bible uses different sorts of text to teach different ways. We [...]
This is a follow-up to the article “What is a Family?” This follow-up asks whether the Bible presents a preferred pattern of family. Discussing Mat 19:3ff; Mk 10:2ff; Gen 1:27,28; 2:18-24; Colossians 3:18-21; Ephesians 5:21-6:4 and 1 Timothy 3:1-4 (cf Titus 1:6) as possible biblical bases for a model of “family”. Part of the discussion [...]
Family in the Bible Social change (high rates of separation and divorce, legislation like the Civil Unions Act last year, some impacts of the much older Privacy Act…) together with the strong Christian tradition of “defending family values” combine to make it really important that as Christians we think through what we mean by “family”. [...]
Five years ago I posted Family: towards a biblical view. It was really just a link to a short article I wrote for the Vision Network site. The article’s URL there has changed, and the two even shorter follow-up pieces I wrote are even more difficult to find, so since I am still (and even [...]
