Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal 27 (2022)

The latest issue of Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal is online, containing the below essays.

The whole issue is available for download here.

Timothy Miller

Rome, Caesar, and the Historical Setting of 1 Peter

Mark A. Snoeberger

Refining Dispensational Discourse: Reconsidering Four Common Expressions

Kyle C. Dunham

The Woman Who Is a Snare: The Identity and Nature of the Female Figure in Ecclesiastes 7:25–29

Jeff Straub

Baptists and Freemasonry: A Conflicted History

Mark A. Hassler

“My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?” Psalm 22 as Direct Predictive Prophecy about Jesus Christ on the Cross

Brett Williams

Augustine’s View of the Church As Revealed in His Use of Cyprian’s Contra Donatistas

Book Reviews

Ethics in Conversation on Augustine, the Trinity, and the Church

The latest Ethics in Conversation from the Kirby Laing Centre is a review by Matthew Wiley of Adam Ployd, Augustine, the Trinity, and the Church: A Reading of the Anti-Donatist Sermons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). It’s available as a pdf here.

Centre for Public Christianity (April 2020)

This month, among other items (including some on COVID-19), the Centre for Public Christianity links to an audio interview with James K.A. Smith on ‘The Story of Your Life’, looking at memoir, biography, and confession.

James K.A. Smith on Awaiting the King

It will come as no surprise to some visitors to this blog that I have greatly appreciated the work of James K.A. Smith over the years (see here, here, here, here, here, and here), nor that I am looking forward to the imminent release of the third volume in his ‘Cultural Liturgies’ project – Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017) – looking at how worship shapes us as citizens of the King.

There’s more information about the book here, and a series of 10 short videos here in which he talks about the book, its emphases, and its relationship with other parts of his work.

He describes the book as a remix of Augustine and Oliver O’Donovan, nourished by his location in the Reformed (especially Kuyperian) tradition, but also pushing back on that tradition by making the church more central in how we think about our political witness.

In line with the earlier volumes in this series, and with Smith’s work elsewhere, he describes citizens as ‘lovers’, not just rational information processors. Our public and political life is caught up in dynamics of desire and formation. If we want to judge the character of a people, we have to discern what they love. The book is a liturgical analysis of what we worship politically, and what we are being trained to love when we step into those places as Christians.

We are, he says, to be a people whose political vision is animated by a vision of the King who is coming. For Smith, this means learning to walk a line between quietism and activism. We’re not just sitting around, not caring our shared public life; we’re waiting for the King. But nor are we activists in the sense that we think we’re going to bring the end about. We wait actively. We are caught up in what God is doing in the world, and the formative practices of the church shape us as a people who then shape the world.

In this sense, Smith hopes the book will recalibrate our posture towards public life, and he makes some helpful comments in this respect on steering between what he sees as the dangers of the ‘court evangelicals’ (those cosying up to power) and the Benedict Option.

The Asbury Journal 72, 1 (2017)

The latest issue of Asbury Journal, containing the below main articles, with the one on Lesslie Newbigin particularly catching my eye.

Nathan Crawford

Improvising with the Quadrilateral: An Augustinian Approach to Recovering the Use of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral in the Theology of Preaching

This article explores the improvisational nature of preaching through a closer examination of Augustine’s view of the theology of preaching in De Doctrina Christiana, and an exploration of the Wesleyan framework, known as the Wesleyan Quadrilateral as an additional, but key supplement to developing a theology of preaching which maintains the centrality of scripture, but permits the important addition of improvisation to meet the needs of changing times and congregations.

Samuel K. Law

Waltzing with Wesley: Wesleyan Theology as a Renewing Framework for Chinese Christian Spirituality and Global Identity

This paper argues that Wesleyan theology, understanding that God’s prevenient grace is working toward the restoration of all Creation, serves as a means of grace for global Christians to incarnate Christianity with their indigenous cultural identity. Using the Chinese context, this paper explores how a Wesleyan perspective, being itself a pragmatic and integrative theology, provides a pathway for the Chinese church, suffering from a hobbled spirituality as consequence of an over-identification with Confucian philosophy, to achieve a synergistic spirituality that balances both biblical and Chinese cultural components. A brief review of Chinese spirituality is first provided.

David J. Fuller

The Theme of Creation in Old Testament Theology from the Twentieth Century Onwards: Assessing the State of Play

One particularly disputed topic within the field of Old Testament theology is the subject of creation, specifically the theological and ethical import of the creation materials. The present study conducts a survey of positions on the theme of creation in significant works of Old Testament Theology (excluding works that utilize a narrative or book-based approach) from the seminal volumes of Eichrodt and Von Rad to the present day. It is the intention of the present study to identify the various zones of general agreement and disagreement within the subcategories present in different discussions of creation in Old Testament Theology, in order to clearly isolate the areas that require further research.

Kelly J. Godoy de Danielson and Robert Danielson

Pentecostal Music in the Public Square: The Christian Songs and Music of Juan Luis Guerra

This article explores the issue of contextualization of music in Latin America, particularly through the lens of Pentecostal singer-songwriter Juan Luis Guerra and his story of healing and conversion. Instead of leaving the pop music scene that had made him famous, he chose instead to stay in pop music and introduce Pentecostal Christian songs into his secular albums and concerts. This is a continuation of a long history of creative contextualization by Pentecostal musicians in sharp contrast to mainline Protestants who still primarily rely on translations of English hymns and music in a world where music is an integral part of the culture.

Kelly J. Godoy de Danielson and Robert Danielson

Música Pentecostal en la Plaza Pública: Las Canciones Cristianas y la Música de Juan Luis Guerra

Samuel Lee

An Eschatological Framework for Assessing the Effectiveness of Business as Mission Companies

This paper attempts to address the following question: “What metric or indicator is most useful for assessing the effectiveness of BAM (Business as Mission) companies?” Several books have provided evaluative tools for assessing ministry viability and business effectiveness, but there are currently none that explicitly deal with a BAM measuring stick for holistic BAM effectiveness. This study thus will seek to offer several possible outlets for the emergence of a relational metric that can be used by BAM practitioners in a variety of different contexts. Specific avenues that will be explored include the business world, economic theory, the Christian canon, as well as church history.

Shawn P. Behan

A Hermeneutical Congregation: A New Reading of Lesslie Newbigin’s Missional Ecclesiology through the “Congregation as Hermeneutic of the Gospel” Principle

Within the Missional Church Movement, the work of Lesslie Newbigin in developing a missional ecclesiology has been foundational. Yet often his ideas are not fully followed, rather just his language or overarching principles. Thus, a new reading of Newbigin’s central idea for missional ecclesiology, the congregation as hermeneutic of the Gospel, is necessary. Looking at his initial work on this concept, expanded with the work of others, along with examples from churches, forms the content of this article. Ultimately, it provides a new way of reading Newbigin’s missional ecclesiology for application in local churches.

From the Archives: E. Stanley Jones and Nellie Logan

The entire issue is available as a pdf here.

Eleutheria 4, 1 (2015)

The most-recent issue of Eleutheria (an open access, peer-reviewed journal led, edited, and reviewed by graduate students of Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary) is online, containing the following main articles:

Letter from the Editor

Timothy B. Chrisman

Jesus and Tiberius: An Examination of Source Reliability

Since the introduction to the critical method of studying the Old and New Testament in the nineteenth century, doubt has been thrown on the historical reliability of the biblical narrative accounts, especially the four Gospels. Yet, far less scrutiny and denigration have been applied to historical sources written during the time of the Roman Empire. A comparison, then, is proposed. It would be beneficial to compare the sources that detailed the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, namely, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and the four sources which chronicled the life of Tiberius, emperor of the Roman Empire during the Ministry of Jesus. How do the sources compare as to their composition in proximity to their subject? Do the sources agree with one another? Is there a level of objectivity in the sources that allowed them to present the correct details of their subject? These questions will determine the reliability of the documents in question and whether the four Gospels measure up to critical examination.

John A. Sypert

Redeeming Rhetoric: Augustine’s Use of Rhetoric in His Preaching Ministry

The art and practice of rhetoric occupied a fundamental place in the ancient Roman world. It is thus not surprising that Augustine (354-430 AD) was deeply committed to the art of speaking well. He spent his youth mastering the theory of rhetoric, putting into practice what he had learned during a preaching career of almost forty years. This essay examines elements of rhetoric in Augustine’s preaching, arguing that he purposely appropriated common rhetorical elements in his preaching for the purpose of making Scripture both plain and compelling to his audience. Augustine’s training in rhetoric is summarized, followed by an overview of the context, Scriptural basis, and style of his preaching. His thoughts on the use of rhetoric in preaching are discussed, primarily by summarizing his arguments from Book Four of his treatise On Christian Doctrine. The essay concludes by offering several examples of rhetorical devices used by Augustine in his preaching.

Tyler D. McNabb

Defeating Naturalism: Defending and Reformulating Plantinga’s EAAN

During the past two decades, Alvin Plantinga has formulated an argument against naturalism that focuses on naturalism’s acceptance of contemporary evolutionary theory. Plantinga argues that given naturalism and evolution, our cognitive faculties have been developed to produce beliefs that meet the Darwinian requirement of survival and reproduction. Plantinga argues that accepting this will lead a naturalist to have a defeater for all of their beliefs, including their belief in naturalism. In this paper, I survey and respond to two types of objections that have been given as a response to Plantinga’s argument. The first objection that I interact with is an objection given by Michael Bergmann. Bergmann argues that a naturalist can continue to hold on to both their naturalism and their belief that their faculties are reliable, even if the probability of their faculties being reliable is low. The second objection that I interact with is an objection that can be seen in the work of Jerry Fodor and Stephen Law. This objection argues that beliefs that enable survival and reproduction will likely be truth conducive and thus, the chance of having reliable faculties is high. I respond to this argument by first reiterating Plantinga’s traditional response to this objection. After I clarify and defend this traditional response, I then reformulate Plantinga’s argument to specifically address metaphysical beliefs. Not only does this give the non-naturalist two different responses to this objection, but I take it that the reformulation could be seen as even more persuasive than the traditional formulation.

Book Reviews

James K.A. Smith on Two Kingdoms Theology

James Smith and Calvin Theological Journal kindly make available his recent essay engaging with ‘Two Kingdoms’ theology:

James K.A. Smith, ‘Reforming Public Theology: Two Kingdoms, or Two Cities?’, Calvin Theological Journal 47 (2012), 122-137.

On his blog, Smith writes:

‘In my little corner of Reformed Christianity, there has been a notable uptick in folks who are sympathetic to “two kingdoms” (2K) theologies of culture – a model more traditionally associated with the Lutheran tradition. There are aspects of 2K thought I appreciate, notably its robust emphasis on the church as a sacramental community as well, its critique of the idolatry of nationalism, and its goal to resist Christian accommodation to partisan politics. There are other aspects, however, that I’m less enthused about.’

He also notes that he hopes to contribute more fully to this conversation over the next few years, especially in the third volume of his ‘Cultural Liturgies’ trilogy.

Eleutheria 1, 2 (2011)

The second issue of Eleutheria (an open access, peer-reviewed journal led, edited, and reviewed by graduate students of Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary) is online, containing the following mix of main articles:

Marcus Little

The Paradoxical Beauty of the Cross: Theological Aesthetics and the Doctrine of the Atonement in Athanasius’ Contra Gentes-De Incarnatio

In his two-part treatise Contra Gentes-De Incarnatio, Athanasius offers an interesting apologetic for the Christian doctrine of the atonement by employing various aesthetic themes and forms of expression drawn from the classical notion of beauty found particularly in the Platonic and neo-Platonic traditions. Although Athanasius never mentions the term ‘beauty’ in Contra Gentes-De Incarnatio, the concept certainly looms in the background. Writing against the Platonic, Epicurean, and Stoic systems of his day, Athanasius centers his apologetic on the philosophical tension evident in the doctrine of divine transcendence/immanence. This paper argues that Athanasius implicitly characterizes the tension of divine transcendence/ immanence as paradoxical in nature and, as such, is not solved but resolved in Christian doctrine of the incarnation and the culminating event of the crucifixion. For Athanasius, the aesthetic force of the crucifixion is its manifold paradox in which Christ, the God-man, conquers by being conquered, restores man’s spiritual form by becoming formless, and establishes universal peace by surrendering to violence. Thus, in the Christian tradition, the divine transcendence/immanence paradox is localized and expanded in the incarnation and crucifixion event invoking an overflow of aesthetic inspiration in the heart of the believer. Therefore, the purpose of this essay is twofold. First, it will identify certain themes in the classical definition of beauty and will examine how these themes are interwoven throughout Athanasius’ apologetic . Second, it will attempt to prove that the aesthetic superiority of the cross, as implicitly argued in Contra Gentes-De Incarnatio, is rooted in the paradoxical nature of the crucifixion event. Thus, for Athanasius, beauty shines forth through paradox.

Gordon D. Harris

Cyprian and his Role as the Faithful Bishop in Response to the Lapsed, the Martyrs, and the Confessors Following the Decian Persecution

In 249 A.D., in an attempt to bring about a renewal in the devotion to Roman authority and the Roman gods, Roman Emperor Decian issued an edict. The edict called for Roman citizens to take part in a simple sacrifice to the Roman deities. Cyprian, the recently named bishop of Carthage, opted to flee the city and avoid the persecution. Upon his return to Carthage in 251 A.D., Cyprian was forced to deal with the results of the persecution among those who had given in to the edict and those who had resisted. He did so with his now famous On the Lapsed. In dealing with both groups, Cyprian was faithful first to Christ and the biblical mandates that he felt the church was obligated to uphold. He was faithful also to the authority of the Church hierarchy, which he felt was being undermined even by the martyrs, whom he did believe had a special place within the Church. Finally, Cyprian was faithful to his position of bishop, which meant he was not only to lead but also to unite his community during difficult times such as persecutions, regardless of what situation or conditions existed that may have led to it. To complete this task, this study will look at a number of challenges that Cyprian faced while he attempted to remain faithful to these three areas. In doing so, the paper will focus mainly on Cyprian’s response to these challenges in his writings from On the Lapsed. The story of Cyprian and the issues surrounding the lapsed do not end with what he wrote in On the Lapsed, and the conclusion of this study will take a few moments to address some of those issues.

Russell Meek

Hans-Georg Gadamer: His Philosophical Hermeneutics and Its Importance for Evangelical Biblical Hermeneutics

Hans-Georg Gadamer’s influence on hermeneutics can hardly be understated. This article offers an evangelical perspective on the importance of his work and how it can be used to interpret the biblical text more faithfully. It discusses his influences and some of the major aspects of his work and offers suggestions for applying his work to biblical hermeneutics. The article concludes that his work is vitally important and should be utilized by the biblical interpreter, though not without caution.

Anthony C. Thornhill

Scholarship and Ministry in the Life and Thought of Augustine

Augustine is frequently recognized as one of the greatest Christian theologians in all of church history. His influence extends to both Protestant and Catholic circles, and his numerous theological works are still referenced by today’s students of theology. The context of his theological writings are often overlooked. While he did, on occasion, seek to write weighty and intricate theological works, his primary focus was upon better equipping himself to minister to the believers he served as the bishop of Hippo. This is clearly evidenced in his sermons and his letters, which provide an important window into his historical context.

Saeculum Undergraduate Academic Journal

Following a recent conversation with a friend on the relationship between theology and culture, I’ve been trying to explore the concept of ‘saeculum’, and came across this journal – ‘a collaborative venture of undergraduate students in the Christianity and Culture program of Saint Michael’s College and the University of Toronto’, which ‘offers a venue for scholarly conversation about life in the saeculum’.

‘In these pages, you will read about the critical engagement between Christian tradition and the broader cultures in which it always and inevitably remains intermixed, including scientific discovery, music and the arts, philosophy and theology, politics and society, and the perennial task of Christian education.’

They provide a nice sketch of the concept itself:

‘“So five ages of the saeculum are ended.”

St. Augustine of Hippo

Thus St. Augustine of Hippo, at the cusp of the fifth century CE, introduced new Christians to life in the contemporary era of human history, a “sixth age” that began with the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and ends only with this same Christ’s return at the end of time. Until this return, the holy “city of God” remains enmeshed in the saeculum, a passing world of social and political life. And, at least for Augustine, this saeculum is also a place of profound tension and ambiguity. Since boundaries cannot be discerned with any certainty in this life, every dimension of human existence is defined by the intermingling of divine communion and earthly commotion, of sacred and secular, of faith and culture.’

Earlier issues of the journal are available here.

Themelios 36, 1 (2011)

The latest Themelios is online here, containing the following articles:

D. A. Carson

Editorial: On Abusing Matthew 18

Carl Trueman

Minority Report: Know Your Limits: The Key Secret of Theological Controversy

Keith E. Johnson

Trinitarian Agency and the Eternal Subordination of the Son: An Augustinian Perspective

Uche Anizor

A Spirited Humanity: The Trinitarian Ecclesiology of Colin Gunton

Stephen Dempster

Review Article: Magnum Opus and Magna Carta: The Meaning of the Pentateuch

Robert H. Gundry

Pastoral Pensées: The Hopelessness of the Unevangelized

Book Reviews

Alister McGrath on Augustine on Origins

Alister McGrath, ‘Augustine’s Origin of Species: How the Great Theologian Might Weigh in on the Darwin Debate’, Christianity Today (May 2009).

I’d read somewhere previously that Augustine (354-430) was embarrassed by the ‘days’ in Genesis 1: why would it take God as long as six days to create the world?

Alister McGrath provides a brief summary of Augustine’s thinking here, based on the latter’s Literal Meaning of Genesis. McGrath writes of Augustine:

‘God brought everything into existence in a single moment of creation. Yet the created order is not static. God endowed it with the capacity to develop. Augustine uses the image of a dormant seed to help his readers grasp this point. God creates seeds which will grow and develop at the right time.’

However, Augustine has no place ‘for any notion of random or arbitrary changes within creation’, and God’s creation ‘is always subject to God’s sovereign providence’.

For Augustine, the six days of Genesis 1 are ‘a way of categorizing God’s work in creation. God created the world in an instant but continues to develop and mold it, even to the present day’.

McGrath notes that although Augustine does not necessarily answer the questions raised by Darwin and evolution, ‘he does help us see that the real issue here is not the authority of the Bible, but its right interpretation’.