Tag Archives: theology

A New Heaven and a New Earth just won the Word Guild Award for best Biblical Studies Book of 2014

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Writing my eschatology book A New Heaven and a New Earth (Baker Academic, 2014) has been a labor of love. Like all my books, I’ve put my heart and soul into it. So seeing the book in print, and hearing of its impact on people’s thinking and lives, has been a great encouragement.

Best Biblical Studies Book—Word Guild Book Awards

To top it off, I just found out that A New Heaven and a New Earth won the World Guild Award for best book of 2014 in the Biblical Studies Category. I knew the book had been shortlisted (1 of 3) for the award by the World Guild (the primer Christian organization for Canadian writers). They had their annual Gala in Toronto tonight (June 13, 2015) and announced winners in various categories.

Best Overall Book—Word Guild Book Awards

The winner for general Academic book was Leonard Hjalmarson for No Home Like Place (The Urban Loft, 2014). Len also won the Grace Irwin prize for best overall book—quite an honor (or should I say honour).

I met Len in 2013 when he roomed with me to attend the Canadian Evangelical Theological Association (CETA) meeting in Victoria, BC. He presented a beautiful paper entitled “Recovering the Practice of Place: A Theology of Place,” which was based on the book he was writing.

I’m honoured to be in such company.

For some other awards the book has received, see my follow-up post.

A Psalm Against David: Why David Didn’t Write Psalm 51

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I’m scheduled to present a paper at the Institute for Biblical Research (IBR), a sort of evangelical version of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), at their annual meeting in Atlanta, on November 20, 2015. It happens just before the start of the SBL.

The paper is called “A Psalm against David? A Canonical Reading of Psalm 51 as a Critique of David’s Inadequate Repentance in 2 Samuel 12.”

The paper is an attempt to read Psalm 51 carefully in light of the superscription, which links it to David’s confrontation by the prophet Nathan in 2 Samuel 12 over his adultery with Bathsheba.

The trouble is that a close reading of the psalm just doesn’t fit with the narrative, at multiple levels. So, what is an evangelical, orthodox Christian to do with that?

Since psalms superscriptions are not original to the psalms, but inserted by later editors (I give evidence for this in the paper), I propose that we take the superscription to Psalm 51 as a (divinely inspired) lectionary suggestion for reading the psalm together with the 2 Samuel narrative.

The result of doing this, I argue, is that the psalm ends up being a critique of David’s superficial “repentance” in 2 Samuel 12. My paper, therefore, challenges the naive, idealistic reading of the figure of David often found in the evangelical church (but then anyone who reads 1-2 Samuel with their eyes open would be disabused of this ideal picture anyway).

The paper is, most fundamentally, my attempt to take the authority of Scripture seriously (regarding both Psalm 51 and 2 Samuel 12 as divinely inspired), with eyes wide open to the complexity of this divinely inspired Scripture.

I tested out a short version of the paper at the recent meeting of the Canadian Evangelical Theological Association in Ottawa, and got good discussion there.

The research group of the IBR in which I’ll be presenting the paper (called Biblical Theology, Hermeneutics, and the Theological Disciplines) posted my draft of a longer, fuller version of the paper so that anyone can read it and send comments to me. I’ll then have a chance to revise the paper in light of the comments, and it will be re-posted in late October, prior to the conference.

The paper will be published (probably in 2017) in a volume of essays coming from the IBR research group, tentatively entitled Explorations in Interdisciplinary Reading: Theological, Exegetical, and Reception-Historical Perspectives, ed. Robbie Castleman, Darian Lockett, and Stephen Presley (Eugene, OR: Pickwick).

I invite you to post your comments or questions here.

Power, Inequality, and Reconciliation in the Church

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In about a week (June 16, 2015) Northeastern Seminary will be having their annual one-day summer Conference on Ministry. This year the topic is Power, Inequality, and Reconciliation in the Church, and the speaker is Dr. Christena Cleveland.

The conference is intended to explore how God’s people can respond to the forces of division, especially in a world that is saturated with inequality along social, economic, and political lines.

Christena Cleveland is a social psychologist, author, and speaker with a hopeful passion for overcoming cultural divisions in groups. She has just been appointed Associate Professor of the Practice of Reconciliation and Director of the Center for Reconciliation at Duke University’s Divinity School.

She is the author of Disunity in Christ: Uncovering the Hidden Forces that Keep Us Apart (IVP, 2013), which won a 2013 Leadership Journal Book Award.

The one-day conference is part of a Doctor of Ministry course that Dr. Cleveland will be teaching throughout the week at Northeastern Seminary. The conference is meant to allow a wider audience to gain the benefit of her expertise while she is on campus.

More details about the conference, including a schedule and registration details, can be found on the Northeastern Seminary website.

Click here to watch a video clip of Dr. Cleveland talking about the topic of her book.