Themelios 44, 3 (December 2019)

The latest Themelios is online here (and available here as a single pdf), containing the below articles.

Editorial

D.A. Carson

But That’s Just Your Interpretation!

Strange Times

Daniel Strange

Remembering a Principal’s Principles

Robert S. Smith

Cultural Marxism: Imaginary Conspiracy or Revolutionary Reality?

What are we to make of Cultural Marxism? This article seeks to answer that question, first, by outlining the key elements and legacy of classical Marxism; second, by exploring the neo-Marxism of Antonio Gramsci; third, by assessing the main ideas and impact of “the Frankfurt School”; and, fourth, by offering some reflections on (i) the links between these thinkers and various contemporary developments, (ii) the wisdom of employing the term Cultural Marxism, and (iii) how Christians should respond to the current “culture wars” that are polarizing the Western world.

Hans Madueme

Adam and Sin as the Bane of Evolution? A Review of Finding Ourselves After Darwin

The diverse essays in Stanley Rosenberg’s edited volume Finding Ourselves After Darwin: Conversations on the Image of God, Original Sin, and the Problem of Evil (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018) offer a Christian analysis of the human person in light of evolutionary thinking. The recommendations to revise our understanding of original sin and theodicy raise particularly challenging questions. Traditional interpretations of Scripture, for instance, are often devalued in order to reduce tensions with our current scientific understanding. Additionally, the more radical arguments undercut doctrines that earlier Christians believed are pivotal to the biblical story. Overall, these noteworthy essays represent a wide range of creative possibilities for updating our theological anthropology in line with a post-Darwinian setting, but they are less convincing when justifying the theological cost for doing so.

William D. Mounce

Do Formal Equivalent Translations Reflect a Higher View of Plenary, Verbal Inspiration?

The article begins by establishing five categories of translation theory and argues that functional translations like the NIV do in fact reflect the meaning of every Greek word, but not in the same way as formal equivalent translations do. Therefore, formal equivalent translations cannot claim a higher view of inspiration.

Matthew Swale

Power for Prayer through the Psalms: Cassiodorus’s Interpretation of the Honey of Souls

Exegesis, prayer, and spiritual formation converge in the Psalms commentary written by Cassiodorus (490–584). Each psalm’s exegesis ends with a “conclusion” considering the implications for morality, doctrine, or prayer. This study focuses on how Cassiodorus’s exegesis of the Psalms provides power for prayer. First, Cassiodorus’s rich expositions of the Psalms of Ascent and Psalm 142 illustrate his approach to the Psalter as God’s provision of superior, life-changing words. Second, prayer flows from Cassiodorus’s handling of individual psalms in four ways: prayerful exegesis, prayer exemplars, prayer templates, and prayer as the means to psalmic formation.

Kenneth J. Stewart

The Oxford Movement and Evangelicalism: Initial Encounters

Commemorations of the birth of the Oxford Movement (later known as Anglo-Catholicism) have regularly intimated certain early commonalities with evangelicalism, especially within the Church of England. It was so at the 1933 centenary of the launch of the movement; such hypotheses have been given fresh life with the 2017 release of the Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement. This essay examines the basis for these suggestions and finds them wanting.

Kyle Beshears

Athens without a Statue to the Unknown God

Apatheism is indifference and apathy toward the existence of God. In our secular age, a person adopts apatheism when they feel a sense of existential security absent God, effectively dissolving their reason, motivation, and will to care about questions related to his existence. This indifference presents a stronger challenge for evangelism than does religious pluralism, agnosticism, and atheism. For this reason, evangelicals ought to explore ways of engaging apatheism.

Mark Boone

Inerrancy Is Not a Strong or Classical Foundationalism

The general idea of strong foundationalism is that knowledge is founded on well warranted beliefs that do not derive any warrant from other beliefs and that all our other beliefs depend on these foundational ones for their warrant. Although inerrancy posits Scripture as a solid foundation for theology, the idea that the doctrine of biblical inerrancy involves a strong foundationalist epistemology is deeply problematic. In fact, inerrancy does not require any particular view of the structure of knowledge, and notable sources on inerrancy tout it in ways inconsistent with most forms of strong foundationalism.

Daniel Wiley

The God Who Reveals: A Response to J.L. Schellenberg’s Hiddenness Argument

The challenge of divine hiddenness has become one of the greatest advocates for skepticism in modern philosophical debate. From this challenge, Schellenberg has developed the now acclaimed hiddenness argument. For Schellenberg, an all-loving God would be always open to personal relationships with finite creatures, and thus all nonbelief would derive from resistance to God. However, the existence of nonresistant nonbelievers, or those who have never resisted the idea of God, must prove that God does not exist, for surely an all-loving God would leave enough evidence of himself to convince finite creatures of his existence and prevent nonresistant nonbelief. In response, I argue that (1) openness to personal relationships and love are not as correlated as the hiddenness argument demands, (2) nonresistant nonbelief is not provable, and (3) Schellenberg fails to reason to God’s omni-benevolence apart from Scripture.

Book Reviews

Bulletin of Ecclesial Theology 5, 2 (2018)

The latest issue of the Bulletin of Ecclesial Theology is now available, the second of two fascicles on the historical Adam. This one carrying the below essays (alas, the summaries in Gerald Hiestand’s editorial relate to the previous issue rather than this one), and several book reviews which ‘likewise focus both on both contemporary and classic works relating to the Historical Adam, original sin, and theological anthropology’.

The issue is available from here via a painless sign-up link.

J. Ryan Davidson

All the Generations from Adam to this Day: The Place of Adam in the Apostolic Fathers

Jonathan Huggins

N.T. Wright on the Historical Adam

Michael LeFebvre

Adam Reigns in Eden: Genesis and the Origin of Kingship

Benjamin Petroelje

The Plight and Solution of the Primitive Person

Joshua Philpot

See the True and Better Adam: Typology and Human Origins

Book Reviews

Bulletin of Ecclesial Theology 5, 1 (2018)

The latest issue of the Bulletin of Ecclesial Theology is now available, carrying the below essays on the historical Adam, and several book reviews which ‘likewise focus both on both contemporary and classic works relating ‎to the Historical Adam, original sin, and theological anthropology’.

The issue is available from here via a painless sign-up link.

Joel Willitts

Adam and Eve ‘Above and Beyond’ Darwin: Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a Model for a Faithful Theological Interpretation of the ‘First Human Beings’

Edward W. Klink III

Genesis Revealed: Second Adam Christology in the Fourth Gospel

John W. Yates III

The Image of Adam: Death in Paul and Genesis 1–5

Gerald Hiestand

A More Modest Adam: An Exploration of Irenaeus’ Anthropology in Light of the Darwinian Account of Pre-Fall Death

Matt Ward

Liturgical Adam: What Every Pastor Needs to Know

Book Reviews

Themelios 40, 2 (August 2015)

The latest Themelios is online here (and available here as a single pdf), containing the below articles, several of which engage with some of the current discussions on Adam and Eve, human origins, and original sin.

Editorial

D.A. Carson

Some Reflections on Pastoral Leadership

Off the Record

Michael J. Ovey

Can Antigone Work in a Secularist Society?

Editor’s Note

Brian J. Tabb

Adam in Evangelical Theology

Stephen N. Williams

Adam, the Fall, and Original Sin: A Review Essay

The contributors to Adam, the Fall, and Original Sin rightly maintain the traditional view of the historicity of Adam and the entry of sin into the world through him. However, the account displays three weaknesses. First, the inerrant authority of Scripture is sometimes interpreted as entailing that the Ancient Near Eastern context of Genesis sheds no light on how it should be read. Second, the question of why humans are justly condemned for the sin of Adam is never answered. Third, no ground for dialogue with science is provided. It is more successful in indicating what we should affirm than in grappling with the difficulties of affirming it.

Hans Madueme

Another Riddle without a Resolution? A Reply to Stephen Williams

Stephen Williams raises a number of concerns with the book, Adam, the Fall, and Original Sin. The authors, he concludes, fail to grasp the nettle of difficulties facing the Augustinian hamartiology. While some of his objections hit the mark, others are less convincing. Original guilt, in particular, is a resilient doctrine. Rooted in Scripture and of a piece with Christ’s atonement and imputed righteousness, this doctrine resists its detractors. Thus, rumors of the demise of original sin as a viable doctrine have been greatly exaggerated.

Richard E. Averbeck

The Lost World of Adam and Eve: A Review Essay

In his new book, The Lost World of Adam and Eve, John Walton tries to show that there is no necessary contradiction or tension between the discoveries of modern science when they are rightly understood and what the Bible actually teaches about cosmic and human origins. The reviewer agrees on this point and many others through the book. The major area of disagreement is that, in order to make his argument, Walton proposes there is no material creation in Gen 1–2; that is, creation has to do with establishing functions alone. This is not sustainable from the text. Both material creation and the functions of those things created are essential components of these creation accounts.

John H. Walton

Response to Richard Averbeck

Daniel J. Estes

Communicating the Book of Job in the Twenty-First Century

In churches, seminaries, and in the scholarly literature, the book of Job is only rarely preached or taught in detail. This wisdom text has always been a difficult book to interpret, and to complicate matters it is increasingly counter to the assumptions and

values of the contemporary culture. This article proposes six strategies for the effective communication of Job in the twenty-first century.

Pastoral Pensées

Eric Ortlund

Five Truths for Sufferers from the Book of Job

The book of Job is an obvious place to turn when a Christian suffers, but it is not easy to discern what God means to teach his people through this difficult book. This article interprets Job’s teaching on suffering from five broad perspectives: (1) God’s purpose in allowing suffering; (2) how Job “diversifies” our interpretations of suffering; (3) what God requires of us when we suffer; (4) what promises God makes about the

end of suffering; and (5) how Job-like suffering grants us a new vision of God.

Book Reviews

IVP Academic Alert 24, 1 (2015)

Among other items of interest in the current IVP Academic Alert (pdf here) is an interview with John Walton about his new book, The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2-3 and the Human Origins Debate, a follow-up work to his earlier one, The Lost World of Genesis One.

Various on the Historicity of Adam and Eve

There seems to be a fair bit of stuff floating around at the moment on the historicity, or otherwise, of Adam and Eve.

1. A new book by C. John Collins – Did Adam and Eve Really Exist? – published by Crossway in the United States (with an excerpt here) and by IVP in the UK. Collins writes:

‘My goal in this study is to show why I believe we should retain a version of the traditional view, in spite of any pressures to abandon it. I intend to argue that the traditional position on Adam and Eve, or some variation of it, does the best job of accounting not only for the Biblical materials but also for our everyday experience as human beings – an experience that includes sin as something that must be forgiven (by God and our fellow human beings) and that must be struggled against as defiling and disrupting a good human life’ (13).

2. An article by Tim Keller on the Gospel Coalition website – ‘Sinned in a Literal Adam, Raised in a Literal Christ’:

‘When Paul speaks of being “in” someone he means to be covenantally linked to them so their historical actions are credited to you. It is impossible to be “in” someone who doesn’t historically exist. If Adam doesn’t exist, Paul’s whole argument – that both sin and grace work “covenantally” – falls apart. You can’t say that Paul was a man of his time but accept his basic teaching about Adam. If you don’t believe what he believes about Adam, you are denying the core of Paul’s teaching.

3. In part picking up on the Collins book and the Keller article, Christianity Today has carried a few pieces on the topic, notably ‘The Search for the Historical Adam’ by Richard N. Ostling.

4. The latest issue of the Southern Baptist Journal of Theology – 15, 1 (Spring 2011) – is devoted to the topic. In the editorial, Stephen J. Wellum writes:

‘We are seeking to stake a claim that to deny an historic Adam and fall and go the way of recent evangelicals is not only unnecessary, it is unbiblical in the strongest of terms. In the end, it will lead to a denial of other parts of Scripture, and ultimately it will undercut the glorious gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. That is why our wide-ranging essays and forum pieces are seeking, in some small way, to demonstrate that from Scripture, theology, science, and more, debating an historic Adam matters’ (3).