Category Archives: Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School

Why I Love Creation Theology—How This Theme Is Interwoven Into My Life, Teaching, and Writing

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As anyone who has taken my classes knows, I talk a lot about the theology of creation. Indeed, in my publications (both books and articles), I keep returning to creation theology either as an explicit focus or more indirectly as a foundation for other topics. 

In this blog post, I give an accounting of the theme of creation in my life, my teaching, and my writing.

Why I Got Interested in Creation

It all started when I was an undergraduate student at Jamaica Theological Seminary. I got hooked on creation theology in my third year of studies (at the tender age of twenty). There were two main reasons for my interest.

First, as a Christian who wanted to serve God, but had no calling to pastoral ministry, I wanted to understand why God had put me in the world. What was my purpose as a human being? And how should this impact my life today as a Christian?

Creation seemed the best place to start, especially what the Bible means when it says that we are created in God’s image (imago Dei).

The second reason I was attracted to creation theology is because creation grounds the entire story of the Bible—a complicated story with many twists and turns, covering many different types of literature. Like most Christians, I was introduced to the Bible in lots of bits and pieces–a psalm here, a parable there, isolated verses from the Pauline epistles, various episodes from Old and New Testament narratives, especially the death and resurrection of Jesus. But I wasn’t really clear how it all fit together.

As a teen and young adult, I was a detail-oriented person, very focused on the concrete. I naturally noticed particularities—an interesting sentence in a book, the crinkling of a leaf, a one-legged grasshopper. But I often found it difficult to see patterns.

Looking back, I have sometimes said that my developmental task as an adolescent was to find coherence—in my experiences, in life, in society, in history. Also in the Bible.

As Inigo Montoya said in The Princess Bride, when things go wrong, you have to go back to the beginning.

So grounding the complexity of the Bible in its beginning—God’s creation of the world—was a most helpful way to understand what was going on in the biblical story.

Teaching Creation—In Southern Ontario

I started teaching biblical creation theology a couple years into my graduate studies, when I became an Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) staff worker. I had the opportunity (facilitated by Brian Walsh) to develop and teach informal (non-credit) courses on the Christian worldview at various universities in Southern Ontario (University of Toronto, McMaster University, and the University of Guelph).

The initial course title was “The Christian Worldview in a Secular Culture.”

After an introduction to worldviews and the rationale for the course, the first substantial topic was the Bible’s view of creation and the human role in God’s world. I was exploring the topic for myself as I taught the course. I grew in my understanding of creation theology year by year, through this teaching.

Teaching Creation—In Upstate New York

Later, while living in upstate New York and studying at Colgate Rochester Divinity School, I continued teaching non-credit worldview courses as a chaplain at the University of Rochester and at some local churches.

I was also invited to teach a more focused non-credit course on the Bible and science, specifically for Christian graduate students (and some professors) in the sciences at the University of Rochester and Cornell University. This opportunity was facilitated by Bob Fay, who was then Professor (now emeritus) of Chemistry at Cornell.

In these courses on the Bible and science I was able to explore further the role of creation in grounding the scientific vocation and how the sciences studied the world God created. While I taught the Bible and an overview of the history of the Bible and science, my “students” (all aspiring or practicing scientists) taught me a great deal about what science was and how it actually functioned.

Teaching Creation—In Formal Credit Courses

Once I enrolled in doctoral studies at the Institute for Christian studies (Toronto), I began teaching adjunct courses to students in the masters program, including a year-long introduction the Bible, along with courses on the Bible and Postmodernity, Humanity as God’s image, and Creation in the Bible and the ancient Near East. I was exploring various facets of the topic of creation in all of these.

When I began my formal teaching career at Colgate Rochester Divinity School (now Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School), a decade after I had been a student there, and then at Roberts Wesleyan College and Northeastern Seminary some years later, creation continued to be an important topic in many of my courses.

These included introductory courses on the Old Testament, the Pentateuch, the Wisdom books, and the Psalms; creation theology was also central to seminar courses I taught on Genesis, Humanity as the image of God, and Creation in the Bible and the ancient Near East.

I even continued to teach my original course on the Christian worldview, significantly revised, under different names, such as “Worldview Foundations” (at the Institute for Christian Studies), “Faith, Culture, and Calling” (at Colgate Rochester Divinity School), “Exploring the Christian Worldview” (at Roberts Wesleyan College), and “Biblical Worldview: Story, Theology, Ethics” (at Northeastern Seminary).

Because of a recent curriculum revision at Northeastern Seminary, “Biblical Worldview” has been renamed “Being in the Story.”

And, of course, much of this teaching grew into writing.

Writing about Creation and Worldviews

The early non-credit Christian worldview teaching for IVCF led to the first book I wrote with Brian Walsh, The Transforming Vision: Shaping a Christian World View (IVP, 1984), where we had a chapter called “Based on Creation.” It was our shared understanding of creation theology that grounded our exposition of redemption and our critique of worldview dualism and modern idolatry.

This is still the most widely read book I’ve written, with translations into Korean (1987); French (1988); Indonesian (2001); Spanish (2003); Portuguese (2009); new Korean edition (2013); new French edition (2017); new Indonesian edition (2020).

When Brian and I wanted to revise The Transforming Vision to explicitly address the postmodern condition and the role of suffering in the Bible, IVP suggested that we write a follow up book, which we did.

Truth Is Stranger than It Used to Be: Biblical Faith in a Postmodern Age (IVP, 1995) contains a chapter on the biblical view of humanity (“The Empowered Self”) and one on creation more generally (“Reality Isn’t What It’s Meant to Be”). This book has been published in a UK edition (SPCK, 1995) and released in two different Korean editions (2007, 2020).

Writing about Creation—Up to The Liberating Image

Just before Truth Is Stranger was published, I wrote an exploratory article in anticipation of my doctoral dissertation, called “The Liberating Image?” The question mark indicated its exploratory character. 

  • “The Liberating Image? Interpreting the Imago Dei in Context,” Christian Scholar’s Review 24 (1994): 8–25.

But when I published my dissertation with the same title (and a different subtitle), I left out the question mark.

I also wrote some other articles on the way to The Liberating Image that addressed creation theology; some of this material was incorporated into various chapters of the book.

  • “Is Creation Theology Inherently Conservative? A Dialogue with Walter Brueggemann,” Harvard Theological Review 87 (1994): 257–277. Published with Walter Brueggemann’s “Response to J. Richard Middleton,” 279–289.
  • “Creation Founded in Love: Breaking Rhetorical Expectations in Genesis 1:1–2:3,” in Sacred Texts, Secular Times: The Hebrew Bible in the Modern World, ed. by Leonard Jay Greenspoon and Bryan F. LeBeau, Studies in Jewish Civilization 10 (Creighton University Press, 2000), 47–85.
  • “Created in the Image of a Violent God? The Ethical Problem of the Conquest of Chaos in Biblical Creation Texts,” Interpretation 58 (2004): 341–55.

Creation theology was important even in an article I wrote on Bob Marley and the Wailers, where I cited song lyrics to show that appeal to creation was one of their strategies for challenging the “Babylonian” status quo.

  • “Identity and Subversion in Babylon: Strategies for ‘Resisting Against the System’ in the Music of Bob Marley and the Wailers,” chap. 9 in Religion, Culture and Tradition in the Caribbean, ed. by Hemchand Gossai and N. Samuel Murrell (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 181–204.

Writing about Creation—After The Liberating Image

Then, once The Liberating Image was published, I started getting requests to contribute Bible dictionary or encyclopedia articles that addressed some aspect of creation theology (especially the imago Dei); even the article on “Salvation” that I wrote with Michael Gorman drew on creation theology as a significant component of the topic.

  • “Salvation,” in the New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, vol. 5, ed. by Katharine Doob Sakenfeld et al. (Nashville: Abingdon, 2009), 45–61. Co-authored with Michael J. Gorman.
  • “Image of God,” in Dictionary of Scripture and Ethics, ed. by Joel B. Green et al. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 394–97.
  • “Image of God,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Theology, vol. 2, ed. by Samuel E. Balentine et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 516–23.
  • “The Genesis Creation Accounts,” in  The T&T Clark Companion of Christian Theology and the Modern Sciences, ed. by John P. Slattery, Bloomsbury Companions (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2020), 15–31.
  • “The Image of God in Ecological Perspective.” Chap. 20 in The Oxford Handbook of the Bible and Ecology, ed. by Mark Harris and Hilary Marlow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 284–298. 
  • “What Does the Bible Mean When It Says We’re ‘Made in the Image of God’?” Answer to question #44 in 101 Great Big Questions about the Bible and Science, ed. by Lizzie Henderson and Steph Bryant (Oxford: Lion Hudson, forthcoming). A children’s book sponsored by the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion.

There were invitations to write other dictionary/encyclopedia articles that I had to turn down due to time constraints. These included:

  • “Image of God” for The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Ethics.
  • “Creation” for The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Theology.
  • “Concept of the Image of God in the Old and New Testaments” for The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies.

Writing about Creation in the Psalms, Job, and the Caribbean

I also began to explore aspects of creation theology that were spin-offs from The Liberating Image, such as creation in the Psalms and Job, and the application of creation theology to Caribbean life.

  • “The Role of Human Beings in the Cosmic Temple: The Intersection of Worldviews in Psalms 8 and 104,” Canadian Theological Review 2. no. 1 (2013): 44–58.
  • “Islands in the Sun: Overtures to a Caribbean Creation Theology,” in Islands, Islanders, and the Bible: Ruminations, ed. by Jione Havea, Margaret Aymer, and Steed Vernyl Davidson, Semeia Studies 77 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2015), 115–134. Reprint from A Kairos Moment for Caribbean Theology (2013).
  • “Does God Come to Bury Job or to Praise Him? The Significance of YHWH’s Second Speech from the Whirlwind,” St. Mark’s Review no. 239 (March 2017): 1–27. Published with a response essay by Jeanette Mathews.

This last article, which addresses the debate between Job and his friends about the status of humanity as degraded or elevated (and God’s answer to the debate), is now part of a new book that links Job with Abraham in Genesis 22):

Writing about Creation in the Garden of Eden

My most recent research has been on creation in Genesis 2–3, exploring the account of human origins in the Garden story. So far I’ve written two essays on this.

  • “From Primal Harmony to a Broken World: Distinguishing God’s Intent for Life from the Encroachment of Death in Genesis 2–3,” chap. 7 in Earnest: Interdisciplinary Work Inspired by the Life and Teachings of B. T. Roberts, ed. by Andrew C. Koehl and David Basinger (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2017), 139–67.
  • “Reading Genesis 3 Attentive to Human Evolution: Beyond Concordism and Non-Overlapping Magisteria,” chap. 4 in Evolution and the Fall, ed. by William T. Cavanaugh and James K. A. Smith (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017), 67–97.

The plan is for this material to become part of a book I am working on for Cascade, an imprint of Wipf and Stock:

  • Life and Death in the Garden of Eden: A Theological Reading of Genesis 2–3 (Eugene, OR: Cascade).

Creation to Eschaton

Creation theology has also been significant for my understanding of eschatology, since the beginning (creation) is profoundly connected to the end (eschaton). This is what led to the name of my blog site, Creation to Eschaton.

Most recently, I’ve written a chapter for a new book on eschatology (scheduled to be published in Spring 2021), where I develop the connection between creation and eschaton, with an explicit focus on the coming of the Shekinah, the Rabbinic term for God’s holy presence in the world.

  • “The New Earth: Cosmic Redemption and the Coming of the Shekinah,” in Four Views on Heaven, ed. Michael Wittmer, Counterpoints: Bible and Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, forthcoming). Chapters by John Feinberg, J. Richard Middleton, Michael Allen, and Peter Kreeft. With authors’ responses to other essays.

The Defining Theme 

Of course, I’ve been writing on other topics besides creation, especially the book of Samuel, the problem of suffering, and the lament psalms (more on that another time).

But creation has clearly been the defining theme of my teaching, research, and writing.

Note: For those interested, most of the articles listed in this post are available as PDFs here.

Reframing Abraham’s Call in Genesis 12—Beyond Supersessionism

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For a long time I have understood the call of Abraham (Genesis 12:1–3) as fundamentally missional or instrumental, in the sense that the ultimate purpose for which God calls this ancestor of Israel is to mediate the blessings of salvation to the nations.

I taught the book of Genesis with this orientation for many years. And this understanding of Genesis 12:1–3 has played an integral role in my framing of the canonical narrative of Scripture in books I have written, such as Truth Is Stranger than It Used to Be: Biblical Faith in a Postmodern Age (1995) and A New Heaven and a New Earth: Reclaiming Biblical Eschatology (2014). It can be found also in a variety of essays written in the intervening years.

Three Challenges to My Interpretation of Abraham’s Call

However, my missional/vocational interpretation of Genesis 12:1–3, and thus my instrumental understanding of Israel’s election, was itself called into question—no less than three times.

Initially, I was challenged by two Christian scholars who had participated in Jewish-Christian dialogue—the Canadian Catholic theologian Gregory Baum (who I met through the Canadian Theological Society) and the American Old Testament scholar Werner Lemke (who was my colleague at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School).

Both Baum (who had heard a paper I gave in 1995) and Lemke (who read my book Truth Is Stranger than It Used to Be in 1996) challenged me to repent of my implicit Christian supersessionism towards my Jewish brothers and sisters. This was something I had not been conscious of in my thinking.

The third challenge, which helped me positively reframe the call of Abraham, was an email conversation in 2007 with the British Old Testament scholar Walter Moberly, as we discussed a chapter he was writing on the call of Abraham for his book The Theology of the Book of Genesis (2009).

These three challenges led me to take seriously the problematic approach to Judaism that I had inherited from the church, which assumed that once the messiah had come, Judaism had become irrelevant and could be safely discarded.

Of course, I would never have put things in quite so stark a way. But I see how my interpretation of Genesis 12 could be harnessed to support that idea.

The question I now had to grapple with was how I could be faithful to my Christian understanding of redemptive history (I am a Christian, not a Jew—even though my mother was Jewish), while respecting God’s desire to bless, not just the nations through Abraham, but Abraham himself—and his descendants, the people of Israel.

On the Way to a New Reading of Abraham’s Call

This required me to engage in a much more careful reading of Genesis 12 than I had previously done.

The result was that when I was composing my chapter on the plot of the biblical story for A New Heaven and a New Earth, I wrote a lengthy excursus on the call of Abraham that attempted to take into account Moberly’s analysis of the issues, while still maintaining (in the end) a missional reading of Abraham’s call.

Once I had completed the excursus, however, I judged that it was too much of a sidetrack from the flow of the chapter and so I ended up simply summarizing the fruits of my analysis in two brief sections—one about the call of Abraham (pp. 61–62), the other about the place of the exodus from Egypt in the larger biblical story (p. 63). Although I did not abandon a missional reading of the role of Abraham/Israel in the story of salvation, I did affirm God’s purposes for the flourishing of Abraham/Israel—on the way to this larger purpose.

Ever since writing this excursus, I intended to work it up into a published essay on the subject, but never got around to the task. I was, however, recently encouraged to do this by New Testament scholar Andy Johnson, who drew on my unpublished analysis for his chapter on the call of Abraham in Holiness and the Missio Dei (2016).

I was further motivated to work on this material by my participation in an ecumenical Jewish minyan in New York City called the Hadar Institute, through which my respect has been greatly enlarged for Jews seeking to respond in faithfulness to God’s covenant.

My connection to Hadar (formerly called Mechon Hadar) came through one of its founding Rabbis, Shai Held. Having had email correspondence and an initial phone call with Rabbi Held (in 2015), and then reading many of his writings. I have twice participated in the week-long Executive Seminar sponsored by Hadar (in 2016 and 2017). I blogged about my first experience of the Executive Seminar here.

At my request, Walter Moberly, along with other Christian Old Testament scholars, joined me in writing endorsements for Held’s recently published two-volume commentary on the Pentateuch, entitled The Heart of Torah. I then organized and chaired a panel discussion of The Heart of Torah at the Society of Biblical Literature in November 2019. I blogged about the collection of essays that came from the SBL panel here.

Beyond a Supersessionist Reading of Abraham’s Call

Most recently my engagement with Genesis 12 and the question of supersessionism led to an essay called “The Blessing of Abraham and the Missio Dei: Reframing the Purpose of Israel’s Election in Genesis 12:1–3.” In this essay, I tried to be faithful to the text of Genesis 12:1–3 (paying attention to its details), while understanding the role of this text in the larger biblical canon—in a way that honors both the Christian and Jewish traditions. At the end of my analysis, I interacted specifically with Martin Buber’s understanding of Israel’s election and the blessing of the nations.

The essay has now been published as chapter 4 in Orthodoxy and Orthopraxis: Essays in Tribute to Paul Livermore, ed. by Douglas R. Cullum and J. Richard Middleton (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2020), 44–64.

This is a volume of twenty-five essays that I co-edited with Doug Cullum, the Vice President and Dean of Northeastern Seminary. It is a Festschrift in honor of our retired faculty colleague Dr. Paul Livermore, one of the charter faculty members of the Seminary—indeed, the person who first came up with the vision to start Northeastern Seminary.

Although I have been moving towards a new reading of Genesis 12 for a while now, the decisive impetus to work on the essay “The Blessing of Abraham and the Missio Dei” was my participation in this Festschrift. I am delighted to offer the current essay in tribute to Paul Livermore, who has always been interested in how the New Testament and the early Christian tradition (articulated by the Church Fathers) are related to the Jewish context in which they were birthed.

I have written a follow-up blog with more details about the fascinating essays in the book, along with an introduction to the incomparable Paul Livermore, whose life of teaching generated these essays from faculty colleagues, church leaders, and past students.

Introducing Christopher Zoccali—Visiting Assistant Professor of New Testament at Northeastern Seminary

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I am happy to announce that Dr. Christopher Zoccali has received a two-year faculty appointment as Visiting Assistant Professor of New Testament at Northeastern Seminary, Rochester, NY.

I have known Chris Zoccali for many years, beginning when he was my student in an MA program at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School (he graduated the same year that I began teaching at Roberts Wesleyan College). He then went on to do a PhD in New Testament from the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David, Ceredigion, UK.

His dissertation has been published as Whom God Has Called: The Relationship of Church and Israel in Pauline Interpretation, 1920 to the Present (Pickwick, 2010), a book that received stellar reviews due to Zoccali’s expertise in clarifying multiple variants of the “new perspective” on Paul. Indeed, I have often had him as a guest lecturer on this topic in my courses, since he knows much more about it than I do.

On Jewish and Christian Identity in Paul

Zoccali has developed a nuanced understanding of Paul’s position on the relationship of Jews and gentiles in the church, where being “in Christ” is the “superordinate” identity of a Christ-follower, but which does not erase or nullify Jewish identity.  Indeed, Paul expected that Jewish Christ-followers would express their devotion to God in Torah obedience (though he did not expect this of gentile converts).

Zoccali was especially attuned to this insight by having to negotiate multiple identities, being born into an ethnically Italian family, yet being part of wider American culture. I myself understand this point, being a citizen of many nations (I immigrated from Jamaica to Canada, and then to the USA). I take it that Zoccali’s point about “superordinate” identity means that while I identify myself foremost as being a follower of Christ, this does not mean that I have to give up my Jamaican cultural identity. Nor do African-Americans or Asians (or people of any other ethnicity) need to suppress their cultural or racial heritage to be Christian.

Neither did Jews need to rescind being Jewish if they followed Jesus as Messiah—this was part of Paul’s argument in his writings. However, what could Paul mean in Philippians 3 about counting all his (Jewish) accomplishments as rubbish or dung, if he wasn’t simply trashing his past?

Because of his interest and expertise in this question, Zoccali was invited to write Reading Philippians after Supersessionism: Jews, Gentiles, and Covenant Identity (Cascade, 2017), to address precisely this issue. This book is part of a series called “The New Testament after Supersessionism.” His volume has received excellent reviews, both by academics and by those who deal pastorally with Jewish-Christian relations.

A recent review from a biblical scholar noted: “This volume does much to illuminate blind spots within traditional readings of Philippians and beyond. Reading Philippians after Supersessionism is well-researched, with compelling evidence for intertextual echoes within Philippians that illuminate Paul’s Jewish thought world.”

And the Executive Director and Academic Dean of the Messianic Studies Institute in Columbus, Ohio  encouraged his readers to “check out this volume on Philippians by Christopher Zoccali! I found it very difficult to put down, and read the lion’s share of it within 48 hours!”

Other Publications

Zoccali has written a variety of journal articles and book chapters on the subject of Pauline exegesis, social identity in the New Testament, and related topics.

His more technical articles are published in the Journal for the Study of the New Testament; Neotestamentica; and the Criswell Theological Review. More popular articles have appeared in the Journal of Beliefs and Values; the Dictionary of the Bible and Western Culture; and the Lexham Bible Dictionary.

He wrote an important article on Israel, gentiles, and Christian identity for the T&T Clark Handbook to Social Identity in the New Testament (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014) and has been invited to write a book on 2 Peter and Jude in the T&T Clark Social Identity Commentary Series.

A short commentary on Romans that he wrote for the T&T Clark Social Identity Commentary on the New Testament (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark) is currently at press. And he has a contract with Cascade to write an entire commentary volume entitled The Letter to the Romans: From Faithfulness to Faithfulness.

Editor of the Canadian-American Theological Review

Beyond having taught Christopher Zoccali in his early years, and having followed his career, I have had contact with him in his role as editor-in-chief of the Canadian-American Theological Review, the journal sponsored by the Canadian-American Theological Association (CATA), an organization of which I am past president. Since he began as editor in 2013, Zoccali has brought the journal from being two years behind schedule to being almost fully caught up (the second issue of 2019 will be published either by the end of the year or in early 2020). He also oversaw the journal’s indexing by ATLA (now Atla, since it is no longer an acronym).

Under Zoccali’s leadership the Canadian-American Theological Review has published articles by graduate students, young scholars, and established scholars; among the latter are theologians Steve Bouma-Prediger, Hans Boersma, and Eric Flett; Old Testament scholars Marion Taylor, Keith Bodner, and J. Gerald Janzen; and New Testament scholars Nijay Gupta, Michael Gorman, and N. T. Wright (Wright has the lead article in the current issue).

Canadian-American Theological Review 8.1 (2019)

Here is the line up of articles:

  • N. T. Wright, “History, Eschatology, and New Creation in the Fourth Gospel: Early Christian Perspectives on God’s Action in Jesus, with Special Reference to the Prologue of John”
  • James T. Turner, Jr., “Temple Theology, Holistic Eschatology, and the Imago Dei: An Analytic Prolegomenon in Response to N. T. Wright”
  • David A. Miller, “A Holistic Eschatology? Negotiating the Beatific Vision and the New Earth in Recent Theology”
  • Dale Harris, “Hospitality, Homosexuality, and the People of God: A Hermeneutical Study”
  • John Byron, “The Legacy of Cain in Pop and Rock Music”
  • Gordon Oeste, “Feasting with the Enemy: Redemptive Readings of Biblical War Texts”

The issue also contains a number of book reviews.

Ass you can see, this is an interdisciplinary theological journal, publishing articles and book reviews on a wide range of topics relating to Scripture, theology, and culture.

You can take out a journal subscription by becoming a member of the Canadian-American Theological Association (which is very affordable, especially for students). This is a digital subscription, which gives you access to the journal portal on the Association website, where you can read (and download) PDFs of any issue, including individual articles.

Exploring the Intersection of Scripture, Theology, and the Sciences—In Rochester

Hard copies of the latest issue will also be available for purchase at the next CATA Fall conference, which will be held on the campus of Northeastern Seminary at Roberts Wesleyan College, in Rochester, NY, October 25—26, 2019. The conference, entitled God’s Wisdom and the Wonder of Creation: Exploring the Intersection of Scripture, Theology, and the Sciences, will feature Old Testament scholar William P. Brown as the keynote speaker, along with some thirty papers on topics relating to the conference theme.

For more information about the conference, including registration, go to the Northeastern Seminary dedicated conference web page.

Zoccali’s Teaching Experience

Christopher Zoccali has plenty of teaching experience. He has taught some thirty courses at Roberts Wesleyan College (in both Old and New Testament), as well as courses at Nazareth College and Empire State College (in religious studies and biblical studies). Having had him as a guest lecturer in both undergraduate and graduate courses, over the past five years, I can testify to his sharp mind and winsome teaching style, which has had students asking when he will be back.

Well, he’s back. And will be teaching a variety of courses, primarily in New Testament, over the next couple of years.

Welcome Dr. Christopher Zoccali!