Engaging Conversations on Bible and Theology
Episodes
Thursday May 19, 2022
Thursday May 19, 2022
Episode: Dru and Erin chat with Lisa Bowens about her groundbreaking work on African American reception of the Pauline epistles from the early 18th to the mid-20th century. In her book, Lisa sets out to answer the question "What happens when African Americans are at the center of Pauline interpretation," and the results of her study are rich and rewarding. Join us for a conversation about this important book in the field of Pauline studies.
Guest: Lisa Bowens is Associate Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary. Her first book, An Apostle in Battle: Paul and Spiritual Warfare in 2 Corinthians 12:1-10, published by Mohr Siebeck, is an apocalyptic reading of Paul's heavenly ascent. She is the author of numerous articles and chapters, including “God and Time: Exploring Black Notions of Prophetic and Apocalyptic Eschatology” in T&T Clark Handbook of African American Theology," “Painting Hope: Formational Hues of Paul’s Spiritual Warfare Language in 2 Corinthians 10-13,” in Practicing with Paul: Reflections on Paul and the Practices of Ministry in Honor of Susan G. Eastman," and “Spirit-Shift: Paul, the Poor, and The Holy Spirit’s Ethic of Love and Impartiality in the Eucharist Celebration,” in The Holy Spirit and Social Justice Interdisciplinary Global Perspectives: Scripture and Theology."
Book (from the publisher's website): The letters of Paul—especially the verse in Ephesians directing slaves to obey their masters—played an enormous role in promoting slavery and justifying it as a Christian practice. Yet despite this reality African Americans throughout history still utilized Paul extensively in their own work to protest and resist oppression, responding to his theology and teachings in numerous—often starkly divergent and liberative—ways.
In the first book of its kind, Lisa Bowens' book African American Readings of Paul takes a historical, theological, and biblical approach to explore interpretations of Paul within African American communities over the past few centuries. She surveys a wealth of primary sources from the early 1700s to the mid-twentieth century, including sermons, conversion stories, slave petitions, and autobiographies of ex-slaves, many of which introduce readers to previously unknown names in the history of New Testament interpretation. Along with their hermeneutical value, these texts also provide fresh documentation of Black religious life through wide swaths of American history. African American Readings of Paul promises to change the landscape of Pauline studies and fill an important gap in the rising field of reception history.
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Thursday May 12, 2022
Thursday May 12, 2022
Episode: Michael Gorman, renowned Pauline scholar, has now penned a commentary on Romans. The commentary is for a diverse audience, including pastors and students. So OnScript co-host Matthew Bates, who is presently teaching a course on Romans, gets special assistance from his current students to ask Mike a smorgasbord of questions. Join us for this especially student friendly episode.
Guest: Professor Michael J. Gorman (Mike) has held the Raymond E. Brown Chair in Biblical Studies and Theology at St. Mary's Seminary and University since 2012. He has taught at St. Mary’s since 1991, first in St. Mary’s Ecumenical Institute and then, beginning in 1993, in both the Ecumenical Institute and the Seminary (School of Theology). From 1994 to 2012 he served as Dean of St. Mary’s Ecumenical Institute. He is a New Testament scholar who specializes in the theology and spirituality of the apostle Paul, the Gospel of John, the book of Revelation, and the theological and missional interpretation of Scripture. He is the author of nearly twenty books and numerous articles, including several volumes on Paul as well as works on Revelation, John, the atonement, Christian ethics, and biblical interpretation more generally. He's the author of numerous books, including the following:
- Romans: A Theological and Pastoral Commentary (Eerdmans, 2022)
- Elements of Biblical Exegesis: A Basic Guide for Students and Ministers, 3rd ed. (Baker Academic, 2020 [orig. 2001])
- Participating in Christ: Explorations in Paul’s Theology and Spirituality (Baker Academic, 2019)
- Abide and Go: Missional Theosis in the Gospel of John (Cascade, 2018)
- Apostle of the Crucified Lord: A Theological Introduction to Paul and His Letters, 2nd ed. (Eerdmans, 2017 [orig. 2001])
- Scripture and its Interpretation: A Global, Ecumenical Introduction to the Bible (editor; Baker Academic, 2017)
- Becoming the Gospel: Paul, Participation, and Mission (Eerdmans, 2015)
- The Death of the Messiah and the Birth of the New Covenant: A (Not So) New Model of the Atonement (Cascade, 2014)
- Reading Revelation Responsibly; Uncivil Worship and Witness; Following the Lamb into the New Creation (Cascade, 2011)
- Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul’s Narrative Soteriology (Eerdmans, 2009)
- Reading Paul (Cascade/Paternoster, 2008)
- Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross (Eerdmans, 2001; 20th anniversary ed., 2021)
- Abortion and the Early Church: Christian, Jewish and Pagan Attitudes in the Greco Roman World (repr. Wipf and Stock, 1998; orig. InterVarsity and Paulist, 1982)
Give: Visit our Donate Page to help OnScript continue bringing you rich conversations on biblical studies and theology.
If you enjoyed this episode ... Have a listen to an earlier episode with Dr. Gorman.
Thursday May 05, 2022
Thursday May 05, 2022
Episode: Matt talks with Reed Carlson about conceptions of the person in the Old Testament and Second Temple literature, and specifically, the significance of the spirit/Spirit when thinking about the self. We talk about farts, the medium of Endor, election, charismatic spirituality, God's character in the Old Testament, and much more related to his book Unfamiliar Selves in the Hebrew Bible: Possession and other Spirit Phenomena (DeGruyter, 2022).
Guest: Rev. Dr. Reed Carlson is Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies at United Lutheran Seminary. He’s active in the church, is ordained in the Episcopal Church, and is married to an ELCA minister. He’s the author of Unfamiliar Selves in the Hebrew Bible: Possession and other Spirit Phenomena (De Gruyter, 2022).
Give: Visit our Donate Page to help OnScript continue bringing you rich conversations on biblical studies and theology.
Wednesday Apr 20, 2022
Wednesday Apr 20, 2022
Episode: In this episode, co-host Amy Hughes talks with Karen O'Donnell about her new book, The Dark Womb: Reconceiving Theology Through Reproductive Loss. There are books that re-evaluate or re-imagine or re-invigorate theology, and then there are books that reveal theology’s silence, presumption, and lack and faces those problems head on. This book falls in the latter category - breaking the theological, liturgical, and pastoral around miscarriage, challenging certain articulations of doctrine of providence, and honestly appraising our practice of petitionary prayer.
Guest: Karen O’Donnell leads the research and teaching in Christian Spirituality at Sarum College, Salisbury, UK. She is a feminist, practical theologian with particular interest in the intersections of body and theology, especially around the issue of trauma. Her first monograph was Broken Bodies: The Eucharist, Mary and the Body in Trauma Theology (SCM Press, 2018) which explored the relationship between the body and trauma in theology. Her second monograph is The Dark Womb: Re-Conceiving Theology Through Reproductive Loss (SCM Press, 2022) which seeks to construct a fresh approach to theology using the experience of miscarriage as a starting point. Karen has published widely on trauma theology, Mariology, feminist theology, and digital theology.
Wednesday Apr 13, 2022
Wednesday Apr 13, 2022
Episode: In this episode Chris Tilling interviews Justus Geilhufe about his book, the Gnade als trinitarisches Sein: Bruce McCormacks Theologie in ihrer Entwicklung aus analytischer und konstruktiver Barthrezeption. Yes, I think this is our first interview about a German language book, but Geilhufe is up to the job and waxes lyrical in conversation with prose many English-only speakers would envy. In this rich episode, we explore Geilhufe’s original account of the development and driving themes of Bruce McCormack’s work, from Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology (1995), through “Grace and Being”, and the resultant controversies, to McCormack’s most recent work. It was a lot of fun to hear Geilhufe’s insights first-hand, and all we need now is someone who will commit to translating his book into English …
Guest: Rev. Dr. Justus Geilhufe, special student between 2012 and 2013, serves as an associate pastor at the Freiberg Cathedral in the Lutheran Church of Saxony. He was born in 1990 in Dresden. After graduating the Lutheran Kreuzschule he worked for one year at L’Arche in France. To pursue his call to being a pastor, he studied theology at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Princeton Theological Seminary, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and Universität Leipzig. Next to his diploma in theology, he also holds a BA in philosophy and a certificate in leadership from the Jesuit Munich School of Philosophy. While serving as an ordinand of the Lutheran Church of Saxony, he earned a doctorate in systematic theology from the Georg-August-University Göttingen with a dissertation on the theology of Princeton’s Charles Hodge Professor of Systematic Theology, Bruce McCormack. Justus is married and has two sons.
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Wednesday Apr 06, 2022
Wednesday Apr 06, 2022
Episode: This episode involves a rich discussion with Brittany Kim and Charlie Trimm about three book's they've written. We first discuss their co-authored book about the discipline of Old Testament theology, including the challenges of relating the two testaments and descriptive vs. normative theology. Then we discuss Brittany's book on Isaiah's familial and servant metaphors, including gendered language for God as well as the way that metaphors can help us wrestle with challenging prophetic texts. Finally, we talk about Charlie's recent work on approaches to violence in the Canaanite conquest, which maps some of the benefits and drawbacks to various proposals for mitigating the challenges of violence in Joshua. And there's much more here!
Guests: Dr. Brittany Kim is an Old Testament scholar, adjunct professor of Old Testament at North Park Theological Seminary and Northeastern Seminary, and she’s a spiritual director. She’s a co-director of Every Voice, an initiative for diversity in theological education. In addition to co-authoring the book Understanding Old Testament Theology: Mapping the Terrain of Recent Approaches (Zondervan, 2020) with Charlie Trimm, she’s the author of Lengthen Your Tent-Cords: The Metaphorical World of Israel’s Household in the Book of Isaiah (Eisenbrauns/PSU Press, 2018).
Dr. Charlie Trimm is Associate Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies at Biola University. In addition to co-authoring the book Understanding Old Testament Theology: Mapping the Terrain of Recent Approaches (Zondervan, 2020) with Brittany Kim, he's the author of The Destruction of the Canaanites: God, Genocide, and Biblical Interpretation (Eerdmans, 2022), Fighting for the King and the Gods: A Survey of Warfare in the Ancient Near East (SBL, 2017), and “YHWH Fights for Them!” The Divine Warrior in the Exodus Narrative (Gorgias: Piscataway, 2014). He’s also a co-director of Every Voice. 
Every Voice - To access the bibliographies compiled by Every Voice, please click HERE.
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If you enjoyed this episode … listen in an earlier episode with Christian Hofreiter about his book Making Sense of Old Testament Genocide.
Friday Apr 01, 2022
Friday Apr 01, 2022
Episode: Have you ever longed for a biblically-rooted theology of child-rearing but didn't know where to turn? Prof. Ervine Sheblazm understands the pain that parents feel as they try to rear their offspring in a complex and troubling postmodernistic society. He wrote this book for Dave, his colleague, but Dave isn't the only one who will benefit. Sheblazm's biblically nuanced, scientifically-based approach will give parents, caregivers, grandparents, aunties, uncles, and others some practical, envliating, and spirtographal ways to care for our unruly ones. Sheblazm draws from the deep wells of scholarship and observational science to bring you what he calls "nuggets of truth." Even those without children will see the Bible and world in a new way.
Guest: Prof. Ervine Sheblazm feels like Einstein, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas trapped in the same body.
Book: The endorsements say it all!
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If you enjoyed this episode ... why not check out the good Dr.'s other episodes, HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE?
Wednesday Mar 23, 2022
Wednesday Mar 23, 2022
Episode: Pour yourself a wee dram of whisky and tune in as Matt and Dru talk with Iain Provan about the perils and benefits of literal(istic) interpretation of Scripture and his new book The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture (Baylor, 2017). In addition to some great convo, in this episode you'll witness the special guest appearance of an Eastern European thought leader, and a new edition of 'How Scottish Are You?' This is a republished episode.
Guest: Iain Provan is Marshall Sheppard Professor of Biblical Studies at Regent College (no, not Regent University) in Vancouver, BC. Provan has written numerous essays and articles, and several books including commentaries on Lamentations, 1 and 2 Kings, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs, and co-authored with Phil Long and Tremper Longman A Biblical History of Israel (John Knox Press, 2nd edition, 2015). He has also published Against the Grain: Selected Essays (Regent College Publishing, 2015), Seriously Dangerous Religion: What the Old Testament Really Says and Why It Matters (Baylor University Press, 2014), Convenient Myths: The Axial Age, Dark Green Religion, and the World that Never Was (Baylor University Press, 2013), and The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture (Baylor, 2017). His most recent book is Seeking What is Right: The Old Testament and the Good Life (Baylor, 2021).
Book: (from the publisher's website) The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture (Baylor, 2017). In 1517, Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of Wittenberg’s castle church. Luther’s seemingly inconsequential act ultimately launched the Reformation, a movement that forever transformed both the Church and Western culture. The repositioning of the Bible as beginning, middle, and end of Christian faith was crucial to the Reformation. Two words alone captured this emphasis on the Bible’s divine inspiration, its abiding authority, and its clarity, efficacy, and sufficiency: sola scriptura.
In the five centuries since the Reformation, the confidence Luther and the Reformers placed in the Bible has slowly eroded. Enlightened modernity came to treat the Bible like any other text, subjecting it to a near endless array of historical-critical methods derived from the sciences and philosophy. The result is that in many quarters of Protestantism today the Bible as word has ceased to be the Word.
In The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture, Iain Provan aims to restore a Reformation-like confidence in the Bible by recovering a Reformation-like reading strategy. To accomplish these aims Provan first acknowledges the value in the Church’s precritical appropriation of the Bible and, then, in a chastened use of modern and postmodern critical methods. But Provan resolutely returns to the Reformers’ affirmation of the centrality of the literal sense of the text, in the Bible’s original languages, for a right-minded biblical interpretation. In the end the volume shows that it is possible to arrive at an approach to biblical interpretation for the twenty-first century that does not simply replicate the Protestant hermeneutics of the sixteenth, but stands in fundamental continuity with them. Such lavish attention to, and importance placed upon, a seriously literal interpretation of Scripture is appropriate to the Christian confession of the word as Word—the one God’s Word for the one world.
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If you enjoyed this episode ... listen in to our earlier interview with Iain about his book Discovering Genesis.
Wednesday Mar 16, 2022
Wednesday Mar 16, 2022
Episode: In this episode, Chris Tilling interviews David Artman, author of Grace Saves All: The Necessity of Christian Universalism (Wipf and Stock). Rich in exegetical claims, Artman boldly proposes that Christian Universalism isn’t simply a possible option, but a necessity to adequately account for the goodness of God. Artman is not defending – to quote Brad Jersak in his foreword – a “sloppy pop-universalism that fails to proclaim Christ alone, the necessity of a faith response, or the reality of judgement”. Instead, today’s guest aims to present something that is biblically compelling and theological orthodox. To teases out the claims, Chris Tilling walks through Artman’s chapters on the bible, judgment, grace, hell, Revelation and more besides.
Guest: David Artman is an ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). He holds master of divinity and Doctor of ministry degrees from Brite Divinity School. He is an only child, a husband, a 5-string banjo player, a minister, and a Christian universalist. Putting all of this together he says this means he is, “kind of spoiled, doted upon, pretty eclectic, and can’t shake the idea that God is in the business of finally saving all of God’s lost and wayward children by grace”. After being in pastoral ministry for over 30 years, he has now shifted gears towards writing and podcasting. His first book, Grace Saves All: The Necessity of Christian Universalism was published by Wipf & Stock in April of 2020. His podcast Is called Grace Saves All. It’s Available on iTunes, Google, and other podcast platforms, as well as at the podcast page of his website davidartman.net. In the podcast he has put forward his own views, and interviewed such notables as David Bentley Hart, John Milbank, John Behr, Brad Jersak, William Paul Young, Brian Zahnd, Brian McLaren, Robin Parry and Douglas Campbell.
Give: Visit our Donate Page if you would like to support OnScript’s work.
If you enjoyed this episode, listen back to our old episode where Brad Jersak interviewed Meghan Henning about her book Educating Early Christians Through the Rhetoric of Hell.
Thursday Mar 03, 2022
Thursday Mar 03, 2022
Episode: In this episode we go back to theological basics. What is a creed? What is a creed for? Co-host Amy Hughes talks with Ben Myers about his book on the Apostles' Creed and it's companion children's book. We discuss what it was like to write theology for an adult audience and for children. This episode also features a short interview with the illustrator, Natasha Kennedy.
e included visiting fellow at Fuller Theological Seminary and member in residence at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton. He's the author (with Natasha Kennedy as illustrator) of The Apostle's Creed for All God's Children, The Apostle's Creed: A Guide to the Ancient Catechism (Lexham), Christ the Stranger: The Theology of Rowan Williams, and Milton's Theology of Freedom. He is a Research Fellow of the Public and Contextual Theology Research Centre (PaCT) at Charles Sturt University and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Queensland. Ben has published widely in theology, literature, and the history of Christian thought. His current research focuses on poetry and theology in the 17th century, especially George Herbert and John Milton.
