God Speaks

To fully appreciate orality, it is critical to deepen our understanding of the Hebraic communication paradigm. In this episode, Bill Bjoraker & Tom Steffen will explore God's intentional engagement with the children of Israel through meaning-filled expressions such as symbol, ritual, and materiality. 

The lives of the saints are the hermeneutical key to Scripture—S. Hauerwas This webinar seeks to explore how engaging oral hermeneutics naturally leads to fresh ways of theologizing that can complement systematic and biblical theology. Building on previous episodes, the discussion will explore how orality and character theology allow for powerful connection and application between biblical charact...

This conversation will begin with a brief and broad consideration of the typical text-reliant, systematic hermeneutical approaches of today. With those markers in place, Tom and Bill will spell out what they are offering by way of an oral hermeneutic and model this in a practical storytelling demonstration. https://godspeaks.buzzsprout.com

This conversation will delve into Tom and Bill’s chapter on how orality has shaped and interfaced with text in the making of the canon. The goal will be to help illuminate how our text-centric paradigm as a holdover from the Enlightenment (that was discussed in episode 3) is a relatively recent development. Furthermore, it will help illuminate how rather than orality being considered some new or m...

In this conversation, Tom & Bill answer the question: How did we get to this place communicatively in the twenty-first century? The discuss will offer some brief descriptions of Christian communication prior to the Enlightenment and then delve into how the Enlightenment played such a critical role in reshaping the nature of thinking and communication. With that established, we can then explore...

Narrative: In the first episode, we explored how biblical orality invites us into a bigger communication narrative of embodied, interpersonal communication with the Triune Creator himself. This episode shifts the attention from the vertical axis to more of the horizontal one: how did God design human persons to live and communicate in community with one another? Picking up where the first episode...

In this episode, Billy Coppedge explores why orality is critical for the future of global missions. It will approach this by briefly looking at the nature of global missions today and critical issues that are being raised. One of the themes running through all such discussions is the nature of human persons and an argument can be made that most (if not all) of today’s crises involve some failure f...