OnScript

Episode: Biblical Samson offered a powerful way of focusing and communicating the struggle, opportunities, and challenge of life for African Americans throughout U.S. history. From the prophesies of his parents concerning the deliverance he'd begin, to the enslaved man who ground at the Philistine mill, to the final moments when he toppled the Philistine temple, Samson was a prominent point of ref...

Episode: The upstart theological movement called open theism is coming of age. It's time to reassess its possibilities, promises, and perils. One of the founders of open theism, Richard Rice, speaks with co-host Matt Bates about varieties of open theism, vexed models concerning God and time, and his own spiritual journey in the face of the intense controversies surrounding open theism within evang...

Episode: The debate as to whether the phrase πίστiς Χριστοῦ should be translated as "faith in Christ" (objective genitive) or the faithfulness of the Christ (subjective genitive) seems interminable. In an important new journal article, Kevin Grasso claims to have entirely disproven the viability of the objective genitive as traditionally understood. Meanwhile, he claims that a third-way solution (...

Episode: Conversations on sanctification can often leave Christians feeling spiritually inadequate and discouraged about their lack of spiritual growth and maturity, but Don J. Payne insists that this arises from a faulty view of sanctification. Instead, Scripture's view of sanctification, which involves being fitted for the presence of God and the purposes of God, should be understood as the sure...

Episode: Dru's discussion with Dr. Esau McCaulley spans across matters of biblical theology, NT interpretation, the hermeneutics of the Black Church in America, and how his own biography has played into his scholarship. Reading While Black (IVP) is a forceful and encouraging message to the Black Church that McCaulley has written so that non-Black readers can listen in and learn. Sho Baraka's blurb...

Episode: "Our Father, who is in heaven..." These words and the rest of the Lord's Prayer are so familiar. They remind us to seek God, draw us into communal prayer with the church, and bring comfort. However, while we repeat words we cherish, sometimes this familiarity becomes distance. In this episode, co-host Amy Hughes talks with Dr. Justo González about his new book  Teach Us To Pray: The Lord’...

Episode: Chris Green is on the show to talk about how God is not saving us from interpretation, but through it - a process that can be "soul harrowing and purgative." Chris talks about problematic and more helpful models of Scripture and its interpretation, his appreciation for George MacDonald, approaches to troublesome texts, and we even have a brief poetry reading from the poetry collection Big...

Episode: Erin Heim and Dru Johnson discuss part II of Erin's paper "Resurrection and the #MeToo Movement," which is part of a larger project that Erin is working on as she wrestles theologically with the sexual abuse that she experienced as a child. In this paper, she probes the connection between the abuse Jesus suffers in his crucifixion and his resurrection body. For Part I, please click HERE ....

Episode: How is memory made and maintained in a community? Moreover, how can a community remember something they never witnessed? A. J. Culp walks us through recent turns in memory theory to explore how Deuteronomy, as a piece of literature, instantiates and reifies memory in Israel. We address misconceptions of memory as individualistic, how literature can form memory, and the use of memory for s...

Episode: Unusually for OnScript, we held a debate. Or perhaps it is better called a friendly chat between two scholars who disagree. On what? On the question of divine simplicity and modal collapse. What does this mean, you may ask? Well, Christian theologians have traditionally held to what is called the doctrine of divine simplicity. This view is defended by Steven Nemes. This is the view that G...

Episode: We're back with our fourth annual live-recorded podcast episode at Nashotah House Theological Seminary! Dr. Jeannine Brown joined us this year to discuss her book The Gospels as Stories (Baker Academic, 2020). Tune in for conversation about the importance of narrative thinking, intertextuality, and women among the disciples, and for a very special speed round. Guest: Dr. Jeannine K. Brown...

 Episode: When you read a passage in Scripture or hear about someone's experience with the supernatural (be it angelic, demonic, etc), what is your instinct? Explain it using specific hermeneutical tools? How? Do you chalk it up to cultural difference? Do you dismiss it? Embrace it? In this episode, co-host Amy Hughes talks with Reverend Esther Acolatse Ph. D. about her book  Powers, Principalitie...

Episode: Was baptism spiritual, political, or both? And to what degree was baptism seen as saving in the New Testament and early Christianity? Why? In his provocative and important new book Caesar and the Sacrament , R. Alan Streett shows that baptism was a politically subversive action that involved swearing an oath of allegiance to a new king. Co-hosted by Matt Bates. The Book: R. Alan Streett,...

Episode: How does Jesus's death rescue not only humanity from its shame, but save God's face? The honor-shame framework changes how we think about the gospel, faith, sin, and glory. It challenges our individualistic readings and theologies. Biblical scholar and missiologist Jackson W. draws upon his years spent as a missionary in China in his award-winning book, Reading Romans with Eastern Eyes (I...

Episode: In a  previous episode  Chris Tilling and Matt Bates interviewed two of the co-authors (Barber and Pitre) of the book,  Paul, A New Covenant Jew . The third co-author of this book, John Kincaid, talks with Chris Tilling about his own chapter on justification, divine sonship, and “cardiac righteousness”, as well as his own future work on justification more generally, and his forthcoming wo...

Episode: Carmen Imes has been on a podcast tour, and we're thrilled that she joined us for this episode to discuss her book  Bearing God's Name: Why Sinai Still Matters . We discuss the often misunderstood prohibition on taking God's name in vain, the relevance of Sinai for Christians, and much more. Guest: Dr. Carmen Imes is Associate Professor of Old Testament at Prairie College in Alberta. She'...

Episode: How should we read the Old Testament? Is there only one valid interpretation or a plurality of interpretations? If the latter, then how do we maintain intellectual humility and find valid methods for addressing the texts of Scripture? For a first-ever joint episode with the Center for Hebraic Thought , Dru talks to Dr. Jaco Gericke of North-West University, South Africa about his journey...

Episode: Who was Paul? How might we understand him as a Jew? What type of Jew was he? How do our answers impact our interpretation of Paul’s theology of justification, Christology, the death of Christ, and more besides? In this episode, Matthew Bates and Chris Tilling talk to two of the co-authors of the new book, Paul, a New Covenant Jew: Rethinking Pauline Theology , by Brant Pitre, Michael P. B...

Episode: What am I? Why am I here? Why do I exist? In this episode, co-host Amy Hughes talks to Joshua R. Farris about the existential crisis-inducing subject of theological anthropology. Farris has written a new book  An Introduction to Theological Anthropology: Humans, Both Creaturely and Divine  (Baker Academic, 2020), a treatment of all of the central questions of what it means to be human fro...

Episode: Erin Heim and Dru Johnson discuss Erin's paper "Resurrection and the #MeToo Movement," which is part of a larger project that Erin is working on as she wrestles theologically with the sexual abuse that she experienced as a child. In this paper, she probes the connection between the abuse Jesus suffers in his crucifixion and his resurrection body. Content warning: This episode contains som...

Episode: Christopher B. Hays sits down with Matt Lynch to discuss one of the most important and hotly contested sections of Isaiah. Among the only Old Testament texts to mention resurrection from the dead, Isaiah 24-27 have long perplexed and intrigued biblical scholars. In this episode, we talk about these texts and ... corn whisky, colonizing Mars, and other important subjects related to Chris'...

Episode: In this episode we discuss Lincoln Harvey’s thrilling guide to the work of Robert W. Jenson (1930-2017). Jenson, arguably America’s most important theologian, is so because he thinks Jesus of Nazareth is always and for ever one of the Trinity. “Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim” is the Father’s eternal Son, so there has never been an unfleshed Word. It follows from this that the God of the G...

Episode: Environmental lawyer Gus Speth said, "I used to think that the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scie...

Episode: Nyasha Junior is back on the show to discuss her new book Reimagining Hagar: Blackness and the Bible . Matt Lynch hosts a discussion on race, ethnicity, and color in biblical interpretation. Taking the character of Hagar, Junior traces a fascinating and at times disturbing history of biblical interpretation on these themes, and helps readers (and listeners) untangle what is often confused...

Episode: In this re-run of a 2018 episode, Matt Lynch interviews Christian Hofreiter (RZIM) on one of the most vexed issues in biblical studies ... genocide in the Old Testament. Christian Hofreiter has been pondering this question for a long time, and has written a groundbreaking work on the subject - Making Sense of Old Testament Genocide: Christian Interpretations of Herem Passages (Oxford Univ...