Category · 26 posts
Bible
- Bible Tinkering and TweakingJanuary 3, 2026
Father Henry Wansbrough (1934 – ) offered this comment on the Universalis App January 1, 2026: “At a certain stage, in the 1960’s, there was a great tendency to translate the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5) as ‘happy are the poor in spirit’ etc. But God’s blessing does not mean ‘happiness’…
- Wisdom Bible BooksNovember 26, 2025
This post is a change of emphasis from Catholic Theology to a Bible study. The Catholic Church classifies six or seven Bible books as Wisdom Books. The Catholic Study Bible, Second Edition, includes Psalms with the comment that Psalms is “often associated” with the Wisdom books. I have not included Psalms in this list of…
- Truth and LoveOctober 31, 2025
It is unfortunate that the 21st Century meanings of truth and love do not do justice to the important ancient Greek and Hebrew words translated as truth and love in most English Bibles. Now we tend to talk easily of scientific truth, religious truth, and personal truth, giving the most weight to scientific truth but…
- 8 - Bible LoveAugust 18, 2025
The English word Love has no deep 21st century meaning. We love our spouses, God, Jesus, golf, football, beaches, mountains, cars, and peanut butter. In English translations of the Bible, love is a very common word. It occurs about 500 times in the Old Testament and about 200 times in the New Testament depending on…
- 7 - More on Sola ScripturaAugust 15, 2025
The Protestant Reformation was a rebellion against some positions and practices of the 1500-year-old Christian Church which had been described as catholic or universal since the second century. The use of Roman Catholic Church as the official name became common after the Reformation. The Roman Catholic Church today, with about 1.4 billion members, still considers…
- Old Testament Wisdom BooksApril 17, 2025
The Great Courses offers hundreds of on-line courses featuring skilled professors exploring a wide variety of subjects. We recently stumbled on a course entitled Reading Biblical Literature. The skilled professor/lecturor is Dr. Craig Koester. We have been enjoying one of these lectures most evenings during Lent. Below are the apps leading to free access on…
- Dramatizing the Old TestamentMarch 27, 2025
Just to get to the point early, the main point of this post is to recommend a new eight-episode series, House of David, available on Amazon Prime. The Free Press describes the series as “a beautiful corrective to a lie that’s seeped into American culture: that Christians see…
- Bible Punch LinesOctober 11, 2024
Bible verses read without pertinent context may be misleading. Sometimes, important verses are at the end of a passage and might be surprising, like a punch to the nose, not making us laugh like a punch line to a joke, but hitting us with simple statements of theological truth! Consider these two verses:…
- Herod, Herod, Herod, Herod, Herod, and HerodOctober 2, 2024
Yes, there are six Herods in the New Testament. I’m not sure that has any theological significance, but does have some historical significance with respect to getting things in the right order and understanding who did what. And it may have some value in trivia game competition and crossword puzzle solving. I started out to…
- John 3:16 - Gospel in a Nutshell...with ContextMay 1, 2024
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. – John 3:16 King James Version (KJV)…
- Pushy Atheists and Weak ChristiansApril 29, 2024
“Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.” – G. K. Chesterton What made me think of that Chesterton quote was an article, Atheists Debate How Pushy to Be, in the October 16 New York Times. The article reported on an early October Los Angeles Council for…
- Septuagint PoetryApril 22, 2024
Daniel 3:57-87 is a beautiful and inspirational worship canticle (Biblical song or poem), part of the prayer of Abednego as he and his two friends strolled about in the flames of Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace, and a staple of Morning Prayer in the Liturgy of the Hours. But, it’s not in all Bibles. Here it is from…
- Massacre of the InnocentsDecember 29, 2019
Saturday December 28 on the Catholic Liturgical Calendar is a Feast day in memory of The Holy Innocents, those slain by King Herod in fear of a new King having recently been born, eventually to replace him as King. If only Herod had known that he had less than a year to live! Much academic…
- THE Bible StoryJanuary 26, 2019
Most of us raised in a Christian church know lots of Bible stories. We know about the sins of Adam and Eve, Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac, the leadership of Moses and Joshua, Samuel’s anointing of Saul and David, David’s killing of Goliath, the wisdom of King Solomon, the birth and ministry of Jesus, the…
- Gospel According to St. John: UniqueNovember 21, 2018
I’m not very skilled at digging deeply into Sacred Scripture, finding new meaning and writing paragraphs about a verse or two. But I love looking at the Bible from a 50,000 foot view, so to speak, and detecting patterns, themes, characteristics, and differences. So, here are thoughts and observations about the Gospel According to St.
- Reading the Bible, Cover to CoverMarch 27, 2018
In a recent morning prayer group discussion, the difficulty of cover-to-cover reading of the Bible was mentioned. The problem is that after the stimulating stories of Genesis and Exodus, it is easy to get bogged down in the legal details of Leviticus and lose interest. Even if an ambitious reader survives Leviticus, Deuteronomy looms ahead.
- Gospel DistinctivesJune 1, 2015
There are lots of interesting differences among the four Gospels. Here is an interesting one to contemplate.
- My New Favorite Bible VerseApril 5, 2015
Just as anybody running for political office needs to have a ready answer to the question, “What are you reading?” anybody spending time in Christian circles needs to be able to reveal, just in case, his or her favorite Bible verse. Being the energetic, works oriented, dirty hands kind of guy I am, I have…
- The (Holy) Bible and (Christian) TheologyOctober 14, 2012
Listening to the Gospel reading this morning from Mark 10 about the young man who went away sad after Jesus told him to sell everything he had and give to the poor inspired some reflection on the difficulties we have understanding scripture and formulating a cohesive theology from it. A couple of things I learned…
- Gifts, Beatitudes, Fruits, and HappinessJune 27, 2012
I have been following some pastoral advice and meditating on The Beatitudes for the past few weeks. I read Living the Beatitudes Today by Dodd and Heaven in Our Hands by Groeschel. And I actually read The Beatitudes in Matthew 5 a few times. Immersed in today’s goal-oriented American culture, it is easy to read…
- A Holy Week MeditationApril 1, 2012
134 All sacred Scripture is but one book, and this one book is Christ, “because all divine Scripture speaks of Christ, and all divine Scripture is fulfilled in Christ” – The Catholic Catechism The diagram below started with one I published earlier, Chaos to Church. I had some feedback and suggestions on that one, and…
- Chaos to ChurchMarch 12, 2012
Below is an early version of a diagram which I developed a few years back after first hearing the term “henotheism” in a theology course at Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary and after some discussion of ecclesiology at that same institution. Who else but me is going to try to express in a simple diagram on…
- Reading the Old Testament StoryDecember 6, 2011
(Note: This is another in a series of postings of material used in a Confirmation class) Attempts to read through the Bible, beginning with the creation stories in Genesis and proceeding through the inspirational and perhaps comforting accounts of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel, Joseph, and Moses often get bogged down…
- Literary Structure in The BibleAugust 24, 2011
With rapid expansion of digital communication, we may be losing the capability of constructing informative or inspiring sentences, punctuated and capitalized correctly, composed of carefully chosen and correctly spelled words, and arranged in logically organized and sequenced paragraphs. Apparently the ancient Greeks and Romans didn’t have those skills either, but they seem to have had…
- Telling the Old Testament Gospel StoryNovember 4, 2010
I am always moved by the reading of the seventh chapter of The Acts of the Apostles in which Stephen, newly elected deacon facing accusations of blasphemy, summarizes the Old Testament story in a 1300 word homily. Two thousand years later it is easy to forget that the Jewish Bible, the Old Testament, was the…
- Scripture Alone?October 24, 2010
A pillar of Protestant theology is Sola Scriptura which means that “Scripture alone is authoritative for the faith and practice of the Christian.” That quote comes from this web site which seems to present a balanced view of the subject and some of the controversy surrounding it. With a unifying common principle such as Sola…