Category: Weblog
A Hermeneutic of Love
Communication is hermeneutical; it involves people sending and receiving messages. To make the communication process work, the sender(s) and receiver(s) both have to meet their own particular, communicative responsibilities. Of course, with literature like the New Testament, the people who sent the messages it contains cannot clarify or supplement anything they have already said. So,…
New Bookshelf Section
The bookshelf has a new section on faith and scholarship, which (for starters) includes the following works:
Simon Kistemaker – Interaction
Simon Kistemaker generally provides balanced, astute commentary on several of Jesus’ parables and parabolic sayings. He attempts to avoid allegorical interpretations, thinking that “in the New Testament we encounter elements of allegory but never a full-fledged allegorical parable” (15). This surface disagreement with Blomberg’s perspective on the parables is mainly an issue of semantics. In…
Simon Kistemaker – Summary
In The Parables, Simon Kistemaker specifically targets “theologically trained pastors. But because technical details have been relegated to endnotes, the text itself is user-friendly to any serious student of the Bible” (8). The introduction describes very broadly some of the basic issues of which one should be aware when studying parables, such as: the meaning…
Dominic Crossan – Interaction
Crossan’s book, In Parables, immediately demonstrates his keen intellect and wide range of reading. The great variety of literature he cites certainly indicates his substantial, literary aptitude. One of the more beneficial parts of the book, however, relates more directly to his detailed reading of Jesus’ parables themselves rather than so much to his wide…
Dominic Crossan – Summary
Crossan’s work, In Parables: The Challenge of the Historical Jesus, is based on several articles that Crossan wrote separately and has now compiled into a single collection (xi). Rather uniquely, through citations from various scholars and littérateurs, the introduction and conclusion attempt to provide some literary commentary related to different ways of reading parables. The…