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One of the many reasons to love the Gospel of Mark is that it is not a story in which the good characters always do good things and the bad ones always do bad things. (...)

“Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches” (Revelation 3:22).  The above recurring words from Revelation 3 (verses 6, 13, and 22) are embedded in the clarion (...)

Death Baptism and Mutual Entombment The idea of being “plunged into someone’s death” and being “entombed” with them, as in Romans 6:3–4, is unnerving. In most contexts, this language would strike us as peculiar and (...)

As is common, the lectionary sections off (shorter) passages from within their larger narrative context. This passage, with its emphases—on empowerment (by the Spirit) to speak with courage and knowledge and a teaching of the (...)

This text is among those in the Bible that are difficult, complex, and our reading depends on where and with whom we are committed to understand it. Angela Dienhart Hancock raises very important issues with (...)

Paul’s letter to the Roman believers is saturated in the Scriptures of Israel—Torah, Prophets, and the Writings. Their voices reverberating through these allusions have become the witnesses in the court of testimony pointing to the (...)

I believe it was New Testament Scholar Pamela Eisenbaum, who described the problem of early Christianity as “Too few Jews, too many gentiles, and no end in sight.”¹ The apostle Paul wrote the letter to (...)

In Romans 7:15-25, Paul concludes that both the law and the individual’s will, while not bad in themselves, cannot bring about the freedom humans need in order to want what is right and to do (...)

In Romans 7, Paul has at least two points to make: (1) the law is good, and (2) the law cannot direct the new life in Christ.  God’s law is good. Torah (the law) was (...)

A typical cheap shot against those who drink from the cup of Luther’s Reformation is that justification by faith alone leads to antinomianism, a salvation that consists of a legal fiction without an interest in (...)