Knowing and Doing (Fall 2019)

The Fall 2019 edition of Knowing & Doing – ‘A Teaching Quarterly for Discipleship of Heart and Mind’ – from the C.S. Lewis Institute is now available online (from here), and contains the following articles:

Joel Woodruff

Discipleship is Messy Business

In this issue’s President’s letter, Joel Woodruff reminds us that discipleship would be easy if we just didn’t have to deal with people. But the reality is that, just as Jesus had to deal with his disciples’s humanity, so do we. Discipleship can be messy. But it’s also glorious.

Thomas A. Tarrants III

Is Spiritual Transformation Really Possible?

Tom Tarrants shares his dramatic story of coming to saving faith out of a life of prejudice, hatred, and self-righteousness. In fact, those adjectives don’t paint the picture as bad as it really was. Tom’s story is inspiring as well as challenging. And it illustrates just how powerful and transformational the gospel can be.

Bill Smith

C.S. Lewis on Miracles: Why They are Possible and Significant

Bill Smith examines C.S. Lewis’s writing about miracles and helps us see how we can weave those insights into conversations we might have today with people who deny the possibility of miracles. This article weaves together Lewis’s thought with Biblical teaching in ways that help us understand a difficult topic in anti-supernatural times.

Andy Bannister

Beast or Masterpiece: What Does It Mean to Be Human?

Andy Bannister challenges the prevailing naturalistic worldview around us that insists that people are merely animals. The wide gap between our Biblical perspective – that people are unique, eternally valuable, and created in the image of God – and the dehumanizing trends in our world today are shown to be as dramatic as can be.

Tom Schwanda

Knowing God with Head and Heart: The Dynamics of Christian Experience

Tom Schwanda completes his three part series on “Growing in Intimacy with God” by digging into the role that experience plays in that process. The tension between knowing and doing, sometimes polarized to unhealthy extremes, is examined with an appreciation for both head and heart, doctrine and experience, thought and emotion.

Randy Newman

Having a Conversation about the Conversation: A Strategy for Pre-Evangelism in an Antagonistic Age

Randy Newman proposes the notion that we may need some pre-evangelistic conversations before we have evangelistic presentations. In a time when many people start from a hostile attitude toward Christians, God, and the gospel, we may need to pave the way for defused discussions with a “conversation about the conversation.”

Ruth Lovejoy

Challenging the Gospel of Efficiency

Ruth Lovejoy, a Fellow in our C.S. Lewis Institute Fellows program, shares how seeing the gospel and the goodness of God more worshipfully can set us free from our love for and idolatry of efficiency. With one eye on the scripture’s story about Mary and Martha and another eye on her to-do list, Ruth helps liberate us from the tyranny of the urgent.

John Donne

Poem: O Death

C.S. Lewis loved poetry and wished he could be remembered most for his poems. They grab us in different ways than stories or prose. In each issue we feature a poem. John Donne’s offering tilts our hearts toward obedience and joy.

Dwight L. Moody

Sermon – What Think Ye of Christ? An Excerpt from The Gospel Awakening

An inspiring classic sermon from the pulpit of one of the great evangelists and preachers, D.L. Moody, that we hope will be a blessing to you.

Vern S. Poythress on the Miracles of Jesus

Vern S. Poythress, The Miracles of Jesus: How the Savior’s Mighty Acts Serve as Signs of Redemption (Wheaton: Crossway, 2016), 271pp., 978-1-4335-4607-5.

The ever-prolific Vern Poythress has a new book out, this one on the miracles of Jesus, particularly as recorded in Matthew’s gospel. Here is the publisher’s blurb, which – along with the subtitle of the book – gives a nice summary overview of what Jesus’ miracles are about:

‘Jesus walked on water. He healed a blind man. He turned water into wine. More than just displays of his divine power, Jesus’s miracles signify something deeper – they’re windows into God’s grand story of redemption, foreshadowing the great miracle of Christ’s death and resurrection... Poythress unpacks how understanding the meaning of Christ’s miracles will help us better grasp the salvation God has brought into the world.’

There is an interview with Poythress about the book here, and – remarkably – the entire book is available as a pdf here.

Centre for Public Christianity (March 2015)

Among other items, the Centre for Public Christianity has posted a video interview with Craig Keener on ‘the credibility of the miracles recounted in the gospels – and those that happen around the world today’, and an audio interview with Wesley Hill on ‘same-sex attraction, singleness and marriage, and spiritual friendship’.

Currents in Biblical Research 12, 3 (June 2014)

The latest Currents in Biblical Research recently arrived; abstracts of the main articles are as below.

Brad E. Kelle

The Phenomenon of Israelite Prophecy in Contemporary Scholarship

In the mid-twentieth century, the classic historical-critical approach to the Hebrew Bible’s prophetic books gave way to the study of Israelite prophecy as part of a social phenomenon known throughout the ancient Near East. Since the 1980s, research on the phenomenon of Israelite prophecy has been marked by two main paradigms. The first extends the basic phenomenological approach and identifies Israelite prophecy as a socio-historical phenomenon shared across various ancient cultures. Prophecy was a form of intermediation between the divine and human, and a sub-type of the larger religious practice of (non-technical) divination. The second paradigm questions the usefulness of the biblical texts for reconstructing the ancient realities of prophecy and suggests that Israelite prophecy was a literary phenomenon that emerged among scribes in postexilic Yehud. Within these paradigms, present research offers new insights on lines of inquiry, such as the relationship between prophecy and psychology, prophets in the Second Temple period, and female prophets and prophecy. Overall, scholarship reflects a sharpening distinction between ‘ancient Hebrew prophecy’ as a socio-historical phenomenon and ‘biblical prophecy’ as a literary/scribal phenomenon, and generally approaches Israelite prophecy not as a single phenomenon but as a set of related phenomena.

Graham H. Twelftree

The Miraculous in the New Testament: Current Research and Issues

Defining the miraculous, the adequacy of the Western mindset to comprehend human experience, and the ability of the historian to establish the occurrence of a miracle, are issues threaded through study of the miraculous. Current work draws attention to our lack of understanding of the miraculous in the period. So far, research on Jesus has not explained his interest in miracles, their meaning, or how they relate to his other work and self-perception. Also, the nature miracles remain a problem, and a critical study of Jesus remains to be written that takes full account of the evidence of his miracles. More work needs to be done on Paul’s understanding of the miraculous. Further, despite studies on individual stories, insufficient work has been done on the miraculous from the perspective of the Gospel writers. Finally, how far early Christianity can be understood without due regard for the miraculous is open to question.

Angela Standhartinger

Recent Scholarship on Joseph and Aseneth (1988-2013)

This article provides a survey of the last 25 years of research on Joseph and Aseneth, a Jewish Greek novel probably written between the first century BCE and the second century CE. This romance expands on Gen. 41.45 to narrate how Joseph and Aseneth met and later married under the auspices of Pharaoh, after Aseneth had turned away from her Egyptian gods to the God of Israel and was visited by an angel with whom she shares a honeycomb. Later in the story she is introduced to Jacob and Levi, repels the attack of a rival lover, the son of Pharaoh, who then dies, so that Joseph inherits his throne and rules in Egypt for 48 years. The principle [sic] topics covered in this review are recent textual editions of this writing preserved in 91 manuscripts in seven languages, the no-less disputed purpose and provenance of the romance, its date and place of origin, and its genre. Gender issues and other major themes of research and an extended pre-modern history of interpretation will also be discussed.

Centre for Public Christianity (December 2012)

The most recent newsletter from the Centre for Public Christianity contains links to several video interviews

• Mike Bassous (adjunct Professor of International Studies at Taylor University and General Secretary of the Bible Society of Lebanon) on what the Arab Spring means for the Middle East and the effects of the Syrian civil war

• Darrell Bock (Research Professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary) on the purpose of Jesus’ miracles and why Westerners struggle to accept them

• Richard Burridge (Dean of King’s College London) on the New Testament attitude towards wealth and the revolutionary impact that such understanding could have on contemporary society

• Michael Schluter on the importance of families for healthy communities and what governments should be doing to foster healthy family relationships.

There is also a review of After Capitalism: Rethinking Economic Relationships, by Paul Mills and Michael Schluter.