Category Archives: BioLogos

I have been appointed a Fellow of Sinai and Synapses

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I have been appointed a Fellow of Sinai and Synapses, a Jewish-based organization in New York City, founded to stimulate critical interaction between faith traditions and contemporary science. Sinai and Synapses is a sort of Jewish version of BioLogos, though BioLogos is an explicitly Christian organization, while Sinai and Synapses has an interfaith focus.

I met the founder and director of Sinai and Synapses, Rabbi Geoff Mitelman, at a BioLogos conference in Baltimore in 2019 (the picture below was taken at the National Aquarium, Baltimore).

The Fellowship is a two-year appointment (2021-2023), during which time I will attend meetings with other Fellows, possibly be interviewed for their “Down the Wormhole” podcast, and write blog posts and do public speaking on issues of science and faith.

This is the announcement about this year’s Fellows on the Sinai and Synapses Facebook page:

We are thrilled to announce the fifth cohort of Sinai and Synapses Fellows! We had some of the strongest applications ever in this round, and selected seventeen people from nine states, plus Washington, DC, the United Kingdom and Brazil. These brilliant, thoughtful and dedicated people will be learning together over the next two years, helping raise the discourse on religion and science in their communities and beyond. With the incredible work that our previous Fellows have already created, we can’t wait to see what happens with this group!

You can see the bios of the current group of Fellows here.

I am very much looking forward to interacting with the other Fellows (and alums of the Fellowship from previous years), We come from such different backgrounds and have such a range of diverse expertise and experiences that I am sure to be energized by the conversations.

I am also hoping that what I learn through participation in this Fellowship will be fruitful for a book I’ll be working on in a couple of years, entitled Life and Death in the Garden of Eden: A Theological Reading of Genesis 2-3 (contracted with Cascade Books).

How Should We Interpret Biblical Genealogies? (BioLogos Interview and Blog Posts)

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I was recently interviewed for an episode of the Language of God podcast. The topic was the genealogies in Scripture, particularly in Genesis and Matthew, about which I had just written a series of blog posts.

This is the description of the podcast that BioLogos posted:

At first glance, biblical genealogies appear to straightforward family trees, the kinds we see on ancestry.com that map out the precise relationships between parents and offspring, tracing back as far as we can go. But is that how the genealogies in the Bible are supposed to be read? It turns out there’s a lot more going on in the genealogies than just that straightforward accounting. Bible scholar, Richard Middleton, shares with us some of the historical context that helps us to see the genealogies as another part of the story of God’s creation.

You can access the podcast on the BioLogos podcast page.

Or on Apple podcasts. Or Spotify. Or Stitcher. Or Google.

The interview is based on blog posts that that BioLogos asked me to write on biblical genealogies (posted in July and August, 2021). They actually asked for one blog post, but I got so into it that wrote a four-part blog post addressing the genealogies in Genesis 4–11 (parts 1 and 2) and the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew 1 (parts 3 and 4).

The series was entitled “How Should We Interpret Biblical Genealogies?”

You can access the four-part blog post at these links:

I learned a whole lot writing them (and had a lot of fun too). I hope you enjoy them.

There are interesting follow-up comments following the first three of these blog posts on the BioLogos Forum.

You can access the comments for Part I here.

You can access the comments for Part II here.

You can access the comments for Part III (with some comments on Part IV) here.

The Liberating Image—The Practical Significance of Being Made in God’s Image

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Back in November 2019, when I was attending the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting in San Diego, I met up with Jim Stump, vice-president of BioLogos. I’ve known Jim for about five years and he asked if he could interview me for the Language of God podcast series that BioLogos sponsors.

The focus of the interview was a topic dear to my heart—what it means to be made in the image of God (imago Dei).

The podcast page introduces the interview this way:

“We were made in the image of God, but what does that really mean? Whom does that apply to? What does that call us to? The Bible is very central to understanding the answers to these questions, as is cultural context. In this episode, biblical worldview professor, Richard Middleton joins Jim Stump in an attempt to answer some of the questions about human identity through both of those lenses.”

This is some of what Jim Stump said on Facebook about the interview.

“Here we talk about the Bible and science (like what each has to say about Adam and Eve), but mostly focus on his specialty: the image of God. I’m biased and prone to believe what I want to be the case, but I think this is a really interesting conversation.”

You can listen to the full interview here on the BioLogos podcast website.

Although Jim does eventually ask me to speculate on how the imago Dei might relate to the development of Homo sapiens, the interview focuses on what the Bible says about the image in its ancient Near Eastern context and its relevance for living in God’s world. I essentially summarize the main thrust of my book The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1 (Brazos, 2005).

Prior to the book, I had written a programmatic article on the subject, with almost the same title: “The Liberating Image? Interpreting the Imago Dei in Context,” published in Christian Scholar’s Review 24 (1994): 8–25.

Jim Stump is from the Missionary Church, the same denomination that I was a member of as a teen and young adult in Jamaica. I did my undergraduate degree in theology at the Jamaica Theological Seminary, which was founded in 1960 by the Missionary Church Association of Jamaica. It turns out that Jim had spoken at a 2007 commencement ceremony at my seminary.

Although the image of God is the focus of the BioLogos interview, I also talk a bit about what Jamaica is like (in response to Jim’s questions).

If you are interested in further reflections on the applicability of the imago Dei to matters of ethics and justice, you can read the blog post I was invited to write for the Imago Dei Fund. It is called “The Ethical Challenge of the Image of God in the 21st Century – Human Rights and Beyond.”

And if you want to explore a bit more about how the imago Dei (and the Fall) might (I emphasize that word) relate to what we know of the origins of Homo sapiens, I discuss these topics in a presentation I gave for the Canadian and Christian Scientific Affiliation, called “Human Distinctiveness and the Origin of Evil in Biblical and Evolutionary Perspectives.”