In his 1526 lectures on Jonah Martin Luther taught that Jesus attacked Judaism and “abolished the Law through His Holy Spirit and liberated us from the Law and its power.”[1] More recently megachurch pastor Andy Stanley has quoted New Testament scholar Thomas Schreiner saying that “the entirety of the law has been set aside now that Christ has come.” Schreiner was saying this was Paul’s view, which we will discuss in a later article. But what about Paul’s rabbi Jesus?  Did he reject... Read more

from Messiah Podcast “Once upon a time, I was a supersessionist,” admits today’s guest, Dr. Gerald R. McDermott. But then his eyes were opened to a whole new perspective on the Bible. The missing piece was the centrality of Israel and the Jewish people. He now calls this the key to understanding Jesus, the gospel, and the whole Bible. His newfound perspective shaped his teaching as a seminary professor and can be found throughout the hundreds of articles and dozens... Read more

Israel has returned its most divisive but most popular politician to its highest office. Voters decided that Benjamin Netanyahu, with all his personality defects that caused this to be the fifth national election in three years, was less dangerous to national security than his chief rival, popular writer and talk show host Yair Lapid. Lapid recently told the United Nations in English what he never uttered in Hebrew back in Israel, that Israel should work toward a two-state solution of... Read more

The third rail is the inside rail that powers a subway.  If you touch it, you will die. In conservatives churches today, both in the Global North and Global South, Protestant and Catholic, the third rail is women’s ordination.  If you say the wrong thing–and increasingly today the wrong thing is to say ordination is for men only–you might be killed ecclesiastically.  You might be cancelled.  You will be called the P-word–a “patriarchalist.” Funny thing, though.  The plain sense of... Read more

We are all familiar with conservative professors being cancelled or fired by secular universities.  But now an evangelical university is doing something very similar.  Chicago’s North Park University, sponsored by the Evangelical Covenant Church (ECC), has recently dismissed one of its most distinguished professors for holding to the ECC’s binding resolution on marriage and sexuality.  The resolution affirms celibacy in singleness and faithfulness in heterosexual marriage. Click here for the rest of this article. Read more

As if we don’t have enough bad news–Putin making advances via war crimes in Ukraine, sexual perversion and abortion celebrated by our President and his administration, socialist economic policies driving stagflation, attacks on churches and pregnancy centers–lately we have also been hearing that atheism is booming and good religion is declining.  People are dropping out of organized religion more than ever before, the so-called Nones. But are they? Baylor sociologist Byron Johnson says they are not.  Surveys have reported massive... Read more

David Bentley Hart is fun to tangle with. When you disagree with him, you get treated to sesquipedalian name-calling. You also learn new things about yourself. In my case, I have discovered that I am, as he puts it so delicately, “truculent,” “incompetent,” “slovenly,” and “rhetorically violent.” But in defending his book Tradition and Apocalypse against my “ludicrously inaccurate” review, David Bentley Hart only confirms my accuracy. When he insists that his book “is a defense of tradition” against my charge that he declares the... Read more

David Bentley Hart was once the darling of postliberal theologians for his brilliant books on divine beauty and the illogic of atheism. But in his new book, Tradition and Apocalypse, he argues that the Christian tradition is bankrupt. Using Newman’s Essay on Development of Doctrine as a foil, he insists that the “rational unity” of the Christian tradition cannot be known with any certitude, and what we take to be apostolic is little more than the result of “political compromise,” “rhetorical evasion,” and “institutional... Read more

Are Christian Zionists destroying Jewish-Christian relations? Are they imposing their own political agendas on delicate political negotiations between Jews and Palestinians in Israel and undermining them in the process? Are they causing a new nadir in Jewish relations with Christians? In a recent Tablet article, Yehuda Kutzer worries that when Christians use theology to advance political agendas in Israel, they produce a caricature rather than understanding. And their allyships on both the Left and the Right often do more harm than good to... Read more

Christian scholars have routinely said that Jesus universalized the particular—transferring the promise of a land for the Jews from the OT to a promise of the whole world to his followers.  This is best put, it is often said, in Matt 5:5: Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. I believed this for several decades after I became a serious reader of the Greek NT in my twenties.  But then several decades ago I realized that a veil... Read more