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Where Is God in Natural Disasters?

Natural disasters are moral tragedies that demand an explanation. Where is God in our broken planet? He’s closer than you think.

Sharon Dirckx

Charles Simeon: Parish Pastor

Leland Brown

Like many renowned pastors of history, Charles Simeon is best known today for his preaching. A prominent evangelical organization devoted to training pastors for preaching even bears his name, the Charles Simeon Trust, whose workshops regularly quote Simeon’s preaching adage: “My endeavor is to bring out of Scripture what is there, and not to thrust in what I think might be there” (Horae Homileticae [London: Holdsworth and Ball, 1832], 1:xxi). But who was the pastor behind this towering preacher, and how did he understand and practice ministry within his particular tradition? This overlooked and fascinating subject is the concern of...

The Last Romantic: C. S. Lewis, English Literature, and Modern Theology

Blake McKinney

Few authors have displayed the breadth of Christian imagination like C. S. Lewis. From his creative world-building, like Narnia and Perelandra, to his compelling argumentation in Mere Christianity, to the moving imagery of The Great Divorce, Lewis has captured his readers’ attention and pointed them further up and further in. Scholarship on the life and writings of Lewis has blossomed in recent years, and Jeffrey Barbeau’s The Last Romantic: C. S. Lewis, English Literature, and Modern Theology contributes to our understanding of Lewis. Barbeau has published works on British Romanticism, Methodism, and English Romantic-era religion. He brings his areas of...

The Gospel of Mark’s Judaism and the Death of Christ as a Ransom for Many

R. B. Jamieson

Many monographs proclaim their ambition to shift a paradigm; few do. In my opinion, this volume stands a better chance than most. This monograph is the second to develop from the author’s doctoral dissertation at McMaster University; the first was published as The Boundaries of Jewishness in the Southern Levant: 200 BCE–132 CE (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2022). The present work applies a nuanced, textured set of conceptualities for discerning and situating the “Jewishness” of an ancient religious text such as the Gospel of Mark, which it employs to undermine the reigning scholarly paradigm, which the author calls “Gentile Mark.” By...

The Greek New Testament, 6th Revised Edition

Peter J. Gurry

First published in 1966, the UBS Greek New Testament hits its 60th birthday this year. It has long been the preferred hand edition for its intended audience of translators, students, and pastors. The arrival of this new, sixth edition is a major publishing event, especially as it is accompanied by a completely new textual commentary (reviewed separately). So much has changed with this edition that it can fairly be called the most significant update to the UBS edition in fifty years (when the third edition was first linked with the Nestle-Aland). By way of review, we can highlight the salient...

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Miniature Codices in Early Christianity

Ched Spellman

In our digital age, the shift from text to hypertext has introduced new opportunities and complexities to the task of reading. What it means to “read a book” might mean many different things. One of the reasons that this paradigm shift feels so destabilizing is because of the unrivaled dominance of the codex “book form” that has been at the center of how people organize and access information for thousands of years. An interesting feature about the earliest churches is that they were early adopters of this then innovative publication technology (outpacing the broader Greco-Roman world by several hundred years)....

Reading the Gospel of John Through Palestinian Eyes

Gary M. Burge

Yohanna Katanacho is a Palestinian Israeli evangelical who lives and works in Nazareth, Israel. He belongs to the large Palestinian Arab minority in Israel and the small Palestinian Christian community within it. And yet, he has an outsized voice within the Palestinian church. He is on a short list of leading Arab-Christian scholars in Israel/Palestine whose members are writing not only for their community but also for the West. And this explains his unique and singular importance. Each of us writes history or theology from a perspective. This might be shaped by innumerable factors such as ethnic background, nationality, gender,...

A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament: A Companion to the Sixth Edition of the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament

Thomas Haviland-Pabst

H. A. G. Houghton, Professor of New Testament Textual Scholarship at University of Birmingham, UK, has provided a long-awaited replacement for Bruce Metzger’s textual commentary bearing the same name (with the obvious exception of a difference in subtitle, reflecting a difference in critical editions of the Greek NT). For unfamiliar readers, the second edition of Metzger’s textual commentary was published in 1994—thirty-one years prior to the publication of Houghton’s textual commentary. Unlike Metzger’s earlier commentary on the UBS4/NA27, Houghton’s commentary reflects shifts in NT textual critical methodology with the emergence of the “Coherence-Based Genealogical Method” (p. 21). This method, to...

Honor, Patronage, Kinship, and Purity: Unlocking New Testament Culture

Chungyeol Lim

David A. deSilva, Trustees’ Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Greek at Ashland Theological Seminary, is a leading voice in cultural and anthropological approaches to Scripture. Among his more than twenty-five books, Honor, Patronage, Kinship, and Purity (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000) has been his most influential and widely used work, shaping both scholarly and pastoral engagement with the cultural world of the New Testament. The appearance of this substantially revised second edition—twenty-two years after the first—invites fresh attention to a book that has already formed readers across several languages, including Armenian and Korean. DeSilva describes this volume as...

Greek and Roman Philosophy: A Survey for Students of the New Testament

R. Thomas Smyly

Tertullian famously asked, “What hath Athens to do with Jerusalem?” Because much of the New Testament (NT) was originally addressed to churches in the gentile world, NT interpreters might answer, “Much in every way.” Every student of the NT must determine how to relate the NT writings to the philosophical traditions that were influential for the audiences they addressed. Timothy Brookins—professor of Early Christianity at the University of St. Thomas and author of Corinthian Wisdom, Stoic Philosophy, and the Ancient Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) and Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Corinthians: Paul, Stoicism, and Spiritual Hierarchy (Grand Rapids:...

Matthew

Mark L. Strauss

This volume is a revision of Blomberg’s 1992 commentary on Matthew in the New American Commentary (NAC) series. It is also part of a new series, the Christian Standard Commentary (CSC). Blomberg discusses this connection in his author’s preface (pp. xv–xx), noting that the vision behind the CSC series was to revise and update the NAC using the Christian Standard Bible (CSB) as the base text (the NAC used the NIV). A revision was only possible for some of the volumes, however, since a number of original authors had retired, passed away, or were otherwise unable to take on a...

New Explorations in the Lost World of Genesis: Advances in the Origins Debate

G. Kyle Essary

John Walton, long a leading evangelical voice on Genesis, first published the popular Lost World of Genesis One in 2001. Over the past sixteen years, he has published seven more volumes in the series, including this latest one. This book supplements previous arguments, with only occasional revisions (p. 8). It also includes contributions from J. Harvey Walton, whose research inspired many of the revisions. As with previous volumes, readers will find this volume clear, readable, provocative, and engaging. After an introductory chapter on the background of this book, chapter 2 discusses Walton’s methodology. This longest chapter shows how his methodology...

Genesis: A Commentary for Biblical Preaching and Teaching

Dustin Burlet

Though written millennia ago in a different language to a different people, the book of Genesis stands as Scripture’s historical, literary, and theological ground floor—effectively establishing God’s promise for blessing and salvation in a world marred and broken by Adam’s sin. Genesis: A Commentary for Biblical Preaching and Teaching, part of the Kerux Commentaries series, is written by both an expert in biblical exegesis (John M. Soden) and an experienced homiletician (Randal Emery Pelton). Based on the “Big Idea” approach, Kerux guides the reader through a well-tested sequence: exegetical analysis, theological focus, preaching and teaching strategies. While there are nearly...

The Art of Narrative Analogy: Identifying and Interpreting Parallel Passages in the Bible

Drew N. Grumbles

Who are the only two people in the Bible to be called a “discerning man”? (Joseph and David; see Gen 41:33 and 1 Sam 16:18). What are the only two events in the Bible that refer to stinking fish? (The first exodus and the second; see Exod 7:18 and Isa 50:2). Though such questions may be seen as useful only for Bible trivia, Seth Postell argues that these kinds of literary connections give the interpreter insight into the meaning of texts. Postell serves as professor at Israel College of the Bible, a Hebrew-speaking Messianic Bible college in Netanya, Israel. He...

Reflections on the Risen and Exalted Christ

Peter Orr

I first heard Don Carson speak in 1993 at Cornerstone Church, Nottingham. Don preached a sermon on John’s Gospel that opened up Scripture for me in a new way as he showed the deep connections between the testaments. The next year I heard him at the UK’s Word Alive conference where I attended a set of seminars that Don ran on biblical theology. This was the first time I had heard of biblical theology, and I was gripped by Don’s presentations. I still have the notes from 30 years ago, and the familiar topics of Melchizedek, Psalm 110, and the...

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