OnScript

Jonathan Lyonhart - Monothreeism (Trinity at the Pub)

Episode: In this episode Chris Tilling interviews Jonathan Lyonhart about his new book, MonoThreeism: An Absurdly Arrogant Attempt to Answer All the Problems of the Last 2000 Years in One Night at a Pub. This is one unique book! By using the genre of a script with stage performance cues and three main protagonists, Lyonhart presents an elegant, witty, and clever case for the Trinity as the key to engaging the most significant challenges to Christian faith. In fact, by means of the character Idi, thirteen objections to Christian faith are listed and then tackled, but not in a way that you might expect. In a conversational yet philosophically sophisticated manner, the book covers such ground as the Trinity, the incarnation, the nature of free will and responsibility, the problem of the soul and the problem of evil, world religions, Feuerbach, morality, patriarchy, and more besides!

Guest: Jonathan Lyonhart received his PhD from Cambridge University, and is now Assistant Professor of Theology and Philosophy at Lincoln Christian University, as well as a Fellow at the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Platonism and a Co-Host of the Spiritually Incorrect Podcast. He's the author of MonoThreeism: An Absurdly Arrogant Attempt to Answer All the Problems of the Last 2000 Years in One Night at a Pub.

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Brent Strawn - The Incomparable God

Episode: Brent Strawn is back for the 4th time, to discuss his new book The Incomparable God. This book is rich, rangey, and full of biblical-theological insight. The discussion is also rangey, and designed to give you a taste of Brent's work over the years.

Guest: Brent Strawn is D. Moody Smith Distinguished Professor of Old Testament and Law at Duke Divinity and Duke University. He's the author of numerous books, including The Old Testament is Dying (Baker) Honest to God Preaching (Fortress), The Old Testament: A Concise Introduction (Routledge), Lies My Preacher Told Me (WJK Press), The Incomparable God: Readings in Biblical Theology (Eerdmans). He's also hosted In Parallel, an offshoot of OnScript that looks at the resonances between biblical and modern poetry.

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Gary Schnittjer - Torah Story

Episode: This episode covers a wide swathe of the Torah's terrain, including reading the Torah as a story (even Leviticus), reading laws that come into conflict with each other, The Cat in the Hat, extended echo effect (literary patterning), what makes the Bible such great literature, the importance of Judah for reading Genesis, the danger of holiness, violent priestly interventions in Exodus and Numbers, the positive role of ambiguity, and much more deriving from Gary's newest book Torah Story: An Apprenticeship on the Pentateuch. 

Guest: Gary Schnittjer is Distinguished University Professor of Old Testament at Cairn University's School of Divinity. He's the author of Old Testament Use of Old Testament: A Book-By-Book Guide (Zondervan Academic), which also has a Workbook; Old Testament Narrative: The Israel Story (to be released in Sept of this year), and Torah Story: An Apprenticeship on the Pentateuch (Zondervan Academic) now in its thoroughly revised Second Edition. Schnittjer also offers daily videos at HebrewDaybyDay.com for students learning biblical Hebrew.

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If you enjoyed this episode ... check out our interview on Schnittjer's Old Testament use of Old Testament.  

 

Jerry Hwang - Contextualization and the Old Testament

Episode: This wide-ranging conversation follows this wide-ranging book, covering topics such as the "is God the same as Allah" question to Filipino views of reciprocity to Thai philosophical views informing aniconism. From the publisher: "Christianity is often viewed in Asia as a Western imposition. Challenging this, Dr. Jerry Hwang examines the Old Testament's cultural engagement of its ancient Near Eastern context, arguing that Scripture itself provides the ultimate model for contextualizing theology in Asia."

 

Guest: Dr. Jerry Hwang is the academic dean and associate professor of Old Testament at the Singapore Bible College. He has authored numerous articles and several books, including The Rhetoric of Remembrance: An Investigation of the “Fathers” in Deuteronomy (Siphrut series: Eisenbrauns/PennState Press);  Hosea: A Discourse Analysis of the Hebrew Bible (Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the Old Testament); ESV Expository Bible Commentary: Isaiah-Ezekiel (Jeremiah portion) (Crossway, 2022), and Contextualization and the Old Testament: Between Asian and Western Perspectives (Langham Press).

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Chris McKinny and Kyle Keimer - Archaeology of Passion Week (pt 2)

Episode: This episode is part two of the three-part series on the archaeology of Passion Week. Chris and Kyle take a detailed look at how archaeological finds in Jerusalem can help us better situate and understand the events of this fateful week. They delve into the Gospel of John, the Last Supper, and Jesus’ trials. (republished from 2021)

Hosts: Chris and Kyle

Summary: Chris and Kyle discuss the following topics:
- Archaeology and the Gospel of John—the pools of Siloam and Bethesda
- The Garden of Gethsemane
- The room of the last supper
- Jesus’ Jewish and Roman trials
- Herod’s palace
- The Praetorium and Gabatha
- The Via Dolorosa.

Resources: Archaeology of the Passion Week Bibliography; Archaeology of Passion Week Visuals (pt 2).

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Image by Heather Truett from Pixabay

Chris McKinny and Kyle Keimer - The Archaeology of Passion Week (Pt 1)

Episode: This episode is the first of a three-part series on the archaeology of the Passion week. Chris and Kyle take a detailed look at how archaeological finds in Jerusalem can help us better situate and understand the events of this fateful week. (This episode is republished from our Biblical World podcast).

Hosts: Chris McKinny and Kyle Keimer

Summary: Chris and Kyle discuss the following topics:
– Traditions about the Passion Week
– How we connect the archaeology to the texts
– Dating and timing the events of the Passion Week
– Views of Jerusalem
– Jesus in the Temple
– Pontius Pilate and Archaeology

Resources: Archaeology of the Passion Week Bibliography; Archaeology of Passion Week Visuals (pt 1).

Give: Help support OnScript podcast and the Biblical World podcast as we grow and develop. Click HERE.

Image by Anna Sulencka from Pixabay

Ervine Sheblazm - A Life Living (a theological memoir)

Isaac Morales - The Bible and Baptism

Episode: In this episode Chris Tilling interviews Father Isaac Morales about his book, The Bible and Baptism: The Fountain of Salvation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic 2022), published as part of the new series, A Catholic Biblical Theology of the Sacraments. This new book by Fr. Morales presents a biblical theology of baptism via an exploration of directly associated themes throughout scripture (water, exodus, invocation “in the name”, etc.). This enables a presentation of baptism that takes more seriously relevant topics in both testaments, not just the pages of the New. In a unique way, then, Fr. Morales develops a truly biblical theology, not just a New Testament one. He also weaves in themes as they develop into the Church Fathers as well as the Church’s liturgy. The work remains sensitive to the (false) lenses readers use to warp a theology of baptism and ably navigates important texts exegetically. OT texts, Paul, the Gospels, the Petrines and many other passages are examined in this highly instructive and generously spirited work. Chris and Fr. Morales discuss this and many other issues together in this episode!

Guest: Father Isaac Morales was born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago. He received a Master of Theological Studies degree with a concentration in biblical studies from the University of Notre Dame in 2002 and a doctorate in New Testament from Duke University in 2007. After serving as an assistant professor of theology at Marquette University for around five years, he felt a call to join the Order of Preachers (aka the Dominicans). He's the author of The Bible and Baptism: The Fountain of Salvation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic 2022). He was ordained to the priesthood in 2018 and since then has taught in the department of theology at Providence College. Before this call he was called Rodrigo Morales and published his PhD, The Spirit and the Restoration of Israel: New Exodus and New Creation Motifs in Galatians with Mohr Siebeck (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck , 2010).

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Amy Balogh - Moses among the Idols

Episode: In this episode, we discuss the god Moses. Yes, you heard that right! It's there in Exod 7:1. But what does this mean? How can we make sense of the transformation of Moses from a man of "uncircumcised lips" to a god? What happens if we read this story in its ancient Near Eastern context? How is Moses also like an idol? We explore this and many other intriguing aspects of the character Moses in this episode with new Biblical World co-host Amy Balogh. This ep is cross-listed with the OnScript podcast.

Guest: Amy L. Balogh, Ph.D., is Lead Lecturer of the Humanities for the Department of Liberal Arts at Regis University’s School for Professional Advancement. She is also founder and co-chair of the new Society of Biblical Literature program unit Comparative Method in Biblical Studies, and Assistant Editor of the forthcoming Lexham Geographic Commentary on the Historical Books (2 vols., Lexham Press). In December 2022, Balogh also became the founding president of the newly formed Religion & Bible Society of the Rocky Mountain Great Plains Region, a 501(c)3 professional organization dedicated to the academic study of the Bible and religion. She's the author of Moses among the Idols: Mediators of the Divine in the Ancient Near East (Lexington Books, 2018). Her forthcoming book uses comparison and myth theory to examine the tension between humankind and nature as expressed in the Hebrew Bible and other ancient Near Eastern literatures. She now joins as a new co-host on the Biblical World podcast!

Hosts: Matt Lynch and Chris McKinny

Give: Help support OnScript’s Biblical World HERE. Thanks to all of you who have supported us!

 

Michael Bird - Jesus Among the Gods

Episode: Michael Bird turns the well-rehearsed scholarly tale about how Jesus came to be described as divine on its head. Jesus didn't become God through the application of Greek metaphysical categories in the third and fourth centuries. Rather, Jesus was depicted as divine within our earliest sources on the basis of first-century categories of ontology. Co-hosted by Matt Lynch and Matt Bates.

The Book: Michael F. Bird, Jesus Among the Gods: Early Christology in the Greco-Roman World (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2022). After several centuries of controversy, the early church came to an uneasy consensus that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine. In his divinity, orthodox Christianity claimed, he shared fully in the nature of the uncreated creator God. But was this doctrinal position crafted from whole cloth in the era of the great ecumenical councils? How did earlier Christ-followers understand Jesus in light of their convictions about the one supreme deity and in the context of a cultural milieu saturated with gods? In Jesus among the gods, Michael Bird gives renewed attention to divine ontology―what a god is―in relation to literary representations of Jesus. Through comparison with representative authors such as Philo and Plutarch, and a comprehensive analysis of Jesus and various intermediary figures from Greco-Roman religion and ancient Judaism, Bird demonstrates how early accounts of Jesus both overlapped with and diverged from existing forms of religious expression. Among the gods, Jesus stood in clear relief, a conviction that may have been refined over time but that belongs to the emerging heart of Christian confession. (Publisher's description, abridged).

Guest: Michael Bird is Academic Dean and lecturer in theology at Ridley College in Melbourne, Australia. Mike has published in both New Testament Studies and in Systematic Theology, and his many publications include Jesus the Eternal Son: Answering Adoptionist Christology, Evangelical Theology, and The Saving Righteousness of God. Mike runs a popular theological studies blog called “Euangelion” and can be followed on twitter @mbird12. Mike and his wife Naomi have have four children.

OnScript's Review: When we say "Jesus is God," who and what we mean by "God" matters. Contrary to merely functional accounts of Jesus's divinity, Bird shows that the first-century world had a robust ontology of the divine. Jesus is indeed a very specific God: the one God who revealed himself to be the eternal creator, the life-giver, and the promise-keeper within ancient Israel. A masterwork of historically informed theology, Bird's Jesus Among the Gods will compel scholars to revise the standard narrative of how Christology developed. -- Matthew W. Bates, author of The Birth of the Trinity; Professor of Theology, Quincy University

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