Themelios 51, 2 (Summer 2026)

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

Editorial

J.V. Fesko

The Council of Nicaea and Christian Character

Fesko argues that the Nicene Creed required moral and ethical virtues to produce its theological orthodoxy. In simple terms, to be a good theologian requires godliness.

Strange Times

Daniel Strange

Hiding in Plain Sight

Strange reflects on the cultural fascination with horror films and their presentation of the supernatural. Biblical reality gives us a metaphysic of the Creator-creature distinction which is capacious enough to include the material and the spiritual without confusing them and without divinising them, the blurring of the Creator-creature distinction (otherwise known as idolatry).

Jan Sklar

Lamb of the Free: A Review Article

In Lamb of the Free, Andrew Rillera argues from both the Old Testament and the New Testament that Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA) is an unbiblical idea. This review considers seven key claims Rillera uses to support his arguments. It focuses on whether they successfully undercut the idea of PSA and provides positive support for seeing PSA as a biblical idea.

Samuel Beh

Sent by a Sending God: Tracing the Verbal Thread of Sending through Luke-Acts

This article establishes the language of “sending” as a significant verbal thread throughout Luke-Acts. By tracing Luke’s use of the sending word group (ἀποστέλλω, πέμπω, ἐκβάλλω, and ἀπολύω), the study demonstrates that Luke frames God’s saving purposes as advancing through a succession of divinely sent messengers, culminating in Jesus, the apostles, and the Spirit-empowered church. The insights provide an important interpretive lens for understanding Luke’s theology of mission and the church’s mandate to participate in the divine mission today.

Paul S. Jeon

The Heart Knows but Will Not Yield: Affective Suppression and the Noetic Effects of Sin in Romans 1:32

This article argues that Romans 1:32 offers a crucial entry point for understanding the affective dimensions of the noetic effects of sin in Pauline theology. Rather than depicting unbelief as a mere failure of knowledge, Paul presents it as a morally culpable resistance to a truth that is already intuited. Drawing on N. Gray Sutanto’s retrieval of the affective model of general revelation, this study reinterprets the sensus divinitatis as a dispositional awareness rooted in dependence and shaped by affective response. The analysis of Romans 1:32 – especially its use of ἐπιγνόντες and συνευδοκοῦσιν—shows that Paul’s concern is not ignorance but a willful suppression motivated by fear, shame, and disordered desire. This reframing challenges dominant rationalist interpretations of the noetic effects of sin and aligns with the broader Reformed tradition. The article concludes by exploring the implications of this affective reading for theological anthropology, apologetics, and Christian witness, arguing that the remedy to such suppression lies not merely in argumentation but in the proclamation of the gospel—a message that convicts the heart and heals through grace.

Kenneth Berding

Echoes of Cain in James 3:7–5:9 and the Problem of James 4:5

James undergirds his exhortations in the middle portion of his letter (3:7–5:9) with a narrative subtext—namely, the early chapters of Genesis, and, in particular, the person and story of Cain as it would have been understood in James’s interpretive environment. An acknowledgment of this subtext resolves most of the interpretive and translational difficulties associated with James 4:5, which should read: “The [human] spirit which he [God] made to dwell in us desires with envy.”

Craig Fredrickson

The Word’s Transforming Work: Sanctification by Scripture in 1 Peter 1:22–2:3

In 1 Peter 1:22–2:3, Peter presents the word of God as the divinely appointed instrument of both regeneration and ongoing sanctification. Souls are purified by obedience to the truth, born again through the living and abiding word, and sustained by an infant-like craving for its pure spiritual milk. Read alongside Calvin, Owen, and Watson, the passage locates the word’s sanctifying power in the union with Christ that Scripture mediates by the Spirit, correcting therapeutic, contemplative, and pragmatic alternatives that displace Scripture from its formative work.Contemporary evangelicalism faces a quiet but urgent crisis of sanctification. While many churches remain committed to justification by faith alone, their approaches to spiritual growth increasingly drift from Scripture’s own design. Therapeutic spirituality, with its focus on emotional healing, and contemplative practices drawn from medieval mysticism now shape much of the discipleship landscape. These trends, though often well-intentioned, mark a subtle departure from the Reformation principle of sola scriptura—not only as the church’s epistemological foundation, but as God’s appointed means for ongoing transformation.

Daniel Kirkpatrick

Will Total Depravity Fall from Grace? A Defense of the Reformed View

The doctrines of grace found in Reformed soteriology are predicated upon an understanding of humanity’s total depravity stemming from original sin. This doctrine is under reevaluation by a group of pastors and scholars concerned about the resurgence of Calvinism in the Southern Baptist Convention and broader evangelical community. This perspective initially gained attention with the 2012 release of A Statement on the Traditional Southern Baptist Understanding of God’s Plan of Salvation and has been advanced through subsequent writings from Adam Harwood. By redeveloping this foundational doctrine of sin, this perspective seeks to dismantle the Reformed understandings of election, atonement, and overcoming grace. This article critiques Harwood’s perspective of original sin and seeks to defend the Reformed doctrine of total depravity against this alternative viewpoint.

Joel MacInnes

Wisdom and Folly in Laodicea: Revelation’s Message to the Laodiceans as Wisdom Discourse

This article examines Christ’s message to Laodicea as “wisdom discourse,” arguing that it employs “wisdom forms,” “allusions to wisdom literature,” and addresses “wisdom concerns.” The message highlights wisdom due to the Laodicean church’s lack of it. This study explores potential parallels between the challenges faced by the churches in Colossae and Laodicea, noting similar diagnoses and remedies. Finally, the article examines how the wisdom theme in the message to Laodicea shapes our understanding of the seven messages in the book of Revelation.

Brandon D. Smith

Retrieving Athanasius: Ruled Readings and Trinitarian Exegesis

This essay argues that evangelical retrieval of the Christian tradition finds a particularly fruitful interlocutor in Athanasius of Alexandria, whose “ruled readings” of Scripture and trinitarian exegesis model a canonically-coherent theological hermeneutic. Against lingering Harnackian suspicions that patristic theology represents a Hellenistic corruption of Christianity, the essay demonstrates that Athanasius’s theological reasoning emerges from a deeply scriptural framework centered on the unity of Scripture and scripturally-rooted doctrinal conclusions. This essay concludes by showing the ways in which Athanasius’s interpretive sensibilities can strengthen evangelical biblical, theological, and ecclesial convictions.

Drew Hunter

The Typology of Jonathan Edwards: A Rejoinder to Cameron Schweitzer

Cameron Schweitzer argues that Drew Hunter’s earlier work on Jonathan Edwards’s understanding of typology is too narrowly christological. This rejoinder argues that Hunter’s view is not narrowly christological and that Hunter and Schweitzer’s understanding of Edwards’s typological exegesis are complementary rather than in competition.

Matthew LaMaster

Mimesis and Christian Leaders: A Rhetoric of Authority and Accountability

LaMaster considers Elizabeth Castelli’s contention that Paul’s use of imitative language reinforces power in authority relationships. While Castelli has not found wide acceptance in the New Testament scholarly guild, a dismissal of her thesis contributes to an erosion of any understanding of pastoral authority in the New Testament. This paper demonstrates that Castelli was right in that imitation does reinforce pastoral authority but wrong in her mischaracterization of pastoral authority. In particular, NT mimetic use reinforces authority by limiting authority, sharing power, encouraging costly virtues, and inverting cultural norms of authority.

Dan Allen

Main-Point-Driven: A Clear Methodology for Implementing the Christ-Centered Hermeneutic

This article addresses the need for a clear methodology for implementing the Christ-centered interpretation. Without a consistent process to guard and guide interpreters, illegitimate connections to Jesus are to be expected. Therefore, the Main-Point-Driven methodology provides readers with confidence to discern how every passage directs us to Christ. Special attention is given to asking the right Christ-connection question and unpacking the C-H-R-I-S-T acronym to aid in memorizing the six possible paths to Jesus. The article closes with a brief apologetic of why the Main-Point-Driven methodology is the correct path forward.

Book Reviews

Jason B. Hood on Imitating God

I was asked to write six brief book notes for the November 2013 edition of EG, published by LICC. I have been posting them individually here.

Jason B. Hood, Imitating God in Christ: Recapturing a Biblical Pattern (Downers Grove: IVP, 2013).

Jesus didn’t come to die and leave us as we are; as Augustine said, ‘Christ, the master of the mint, came along to stamp the coins afresh.’ Taking his cue from Paul’s desire to see a cross-shaped pattern replicated in the lives of believers, Hood provides an illuminating treatment of imitation as a crucial dimension of the Christian faith – one which informs our identity, shapes our disciple-making and mission, and prepares us for our destiny.

Jason B. Hood on Imitating God in Christ

I recently received a copy of Jason B. Hood, Imitating God in Christ: Recapturing a Biblical Pattern (Downers Grove: IVP, 2013), having had it on pre-order for some time. I’m trying to save it for holiday reading later this summer, but it’s been very tempting to dip into it.

It comes in four parts – Imitating God, Imitating Jesus, Imitating the Saints, Imitation Yesterday and Today – and looks as if it’s seeking to let Scripture set the agenda in its treatment; I suspect it will be an important contribution to current thinking around discipleship, vocation, and sanctification, among other topics. Given what he has written elsewhere, it will almost certainly also address ongoing debates around the appropriateness of ‘moralising’ from Old Testament texts.

Anyway, there are some interviews with Jason Hood here and here which provide a flavour of what to expect.

Here’s a taster from one of them:

‘What’s often missed is that imitation doesn’t start with Jesus. Imitation starts with our identity as God’s image-bearers, made to reflect his character and his creativity. From the very first page of the Bible, humans are imitating God in response to his initiative and his grace. In the gospel we see the restoration of image-bearing in God’s True Image, Jesus his Son. All four gospels, and Paul’s theological explorations, are pretty saturated with the great theme of imitating Jesus and the theology that lies underneath it. Jesus didn’t just come to die and leave us as is; as Augustine says, “Christ, the master of the mint, came along to stamp the coins afresh.”’

Horizons in Biblical Theology 33, 2 (2011)

The latest Horizons in Biblical Theology carries four interesting-looking main essays, with the following summaries:

Nicholas Ansell

On (Not) Obeying the Sabbath: Reading Jesus Reading Scripture

This essay examines the sabbath controversy of Mark 2:23-28 to see how Jesus faces the challenge of biblical interpretation as he models what it means for his disciples to image God in freedom. In dominant approaches to the Gospels, the interpretive process set in motion by this passage, which I characterize as ‘reading Scripture reading Jesus reading Scripture,’ is confined to its earlier stages – a reductionism that calls for hermeneutical reflection. If a narrative has a ‘life of its own’ beyond authorial intention (indispensable though the author may be), can we say the same about a character who is central to a narrative? If so, is ‘the Jesus of Mark’s Gospel’ ‘more than’ the ‘Markan Jesus’ of much scholarly concern? This essay seeks to develop an intertextual, Christocentric hermeneutic by attending to the implicit as well as explicit ways in which Jesus’ reading of Scripture takes place ‘within’ the Gospel narrative.

James E. Robson

Forgotten Dimensions of Holiness

This article explores a sometimes forgotten dimension of divine holiness, divine holiness as love. It starts by reflecting on an apparent incongruity between the New Testament summary of the law, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself” (Lev 19:18) and that verse’s context in Leviticus, where a more probable summary is the call, “Be holy for I, YHWH your God, am holy” (Lev 19:2). It examines the significance of the conjunction of Lev 19:2 and 19:18, and argues that it is appropriate to speak of love as a dimension of divine holiness. In the main part of the article, which looks at the Old Testament more widely, including Exodus, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Hosea and the prayer life of Israel, divine holiness as love is evident on closer examination in three ways: holiness and self-disclosure, holiness and saving activity, and holiness and divine presence.

Yung Suk Kim

“Imitators” (Mimetai) in 1 Cor. 4:16 and 11:1: A New Reading of Threefold Embodiment

When it comes to the language of “imitation” (mimesis) in Paul’s letters (1 Cor. 4:16; 11:1; Phil. 3:17; 1 Thess. 1:6-7; 2:14), divisions among scholars are most clearly manifest. At one end of the scholarly spectrum, Paul follows a Stoic model of imitation, according to which the teacher exhorts pupils to follow him, based upon his authority established (demonstrated) by good conduct. Accordingly, Paul is viewed as an advocate of the Hellenistic ideal of unity at the expense of diversity. At the other end of the spectrum, Paul is seen as a social conservative and an obstacle to true liberation. Here the idea of imitation serves as a means of control and domination of others, as post-colonial and feminist scholars have pointed out. So Paul’s exhortation to “be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Cor. 11:1) is understood as a demand for sameness, an appeal to copy Paul. However, the language of imitation can be read through the eyes of “embodiment” – a way of life, as an alternate meaning of imitation in 1 Corinthians, which will lead to the involvement of three aspects of God, Christ and the believer. I argue that imitation in 1 Corinthians is neither a copy or sameness nor a type or model to be emulated by the Corinthians. Rather, it should be understood as a way of life rooted in the image of Christ crucified, which plays a central role in the letter, deconstructing abusive, destructive powers in a community and society and reconstructing a beloved community for all.

Mark McEntire

The God at the End of the Story: Are Biblical Theology and Narrative Character Development Compatible?

If the end goal of theology of the Hebrew Scriptures is a description of God and God’s relationship to the world, then the Hebrew Scriptures present us with a dilemma. It is increasingly apparent that the Tanak provides a wide variety of portraits of the divine being. There are two basic possibilities for making use of all of these portraits. The first option is to lay all of them out on a level surface and allow them be in dialogue and tension with one another. The second option is to place these portrayals on a trajectory which gives a position of privilege to those which are at some particular point along the path. Of course there are three choices of trajectory: Historical, canonical, or narrative. The last two differ far more for the Christian Old Testament than for the Tanak. A strictly narrative approach, which reads the biblical story from Genesis to Nehemiah, presents a divine being who is changing and developing as a character, a process which has been well demonstrated over the past decade by Jack Miles, Richard Elliot Friedman, W. Lee Humphreys, Meir Sternberg, Jerome M. Segal, and others. There is general agreement that the divine character portrayed at the end of this narrative trajectory is the one which matches the religious experience of those who were putting the literature, both the individual books and the canon, into its final form. This conclusion would seem to point toward a narrative method of doing theology which gives this endpoint a place of privilege, an observation which raises two questions. First, does this match the actual use of texts by those who are attempting narrative approaches to biblical theology? Second, what role do those portrayals which present earlier stages in the divine character development play in a narrative approach to a theology of the Hebrew Scriptures?