My tradition (the Baptist part of the Nonconformist or radical Reformation) has stressed the idea that Scripture is perspicuous, that the Bible is easy to understand, and that anyone can understand it – or at least grasp its essentials – without special training or equipment. Yet there are for sure some difficult passages. There are [&hellip...
To complete my little trilogy of ‘casts I turn to suggest a richer approach to “kingship” in Samuel than the simple messianism my previous ‘cast suggested. With the help of Oscar Wilde’s poems: Libertatis Sacra Fames (text and comment), and Sonnet to Liberty I suggest we listen to both “majority view” and the “minority report” [&hellip...
At the end of the book of Ezra there a horrid account of Ezra and the “officials” gang up to force Judeans who have married foreign women to divorce them and send away them and their children. What do we do with passages like this? And as part of our thinking on this, where DO [&hellip...
