Prompted by reading James McGrath’s post (and expanding a comment I left there) I make a brief contribution to the Blog Co-op requested by April DeConick (who I hope will yet respond to being tagged with the Excellent meme).
Tertullian indulges in rhetoric, both in saying “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” (Prescription against Heretics [...]
Humans are very fond of labels, especially as a tool for dismissing people. There’ve been a couple of recent blog examples of this. First there was the all-too-typical-of-a-certain-mindset discussion (I’m sure there ought to be a single German word for that) of whether Mike Bird was a Christian. Theo Geek Andrew picks up on that [...]
I heard again today someone referring to the possibility of speaking about the Holy Spirit as feminine. Now at one level I have no problems with referring to our Creator as the one who mothers us, or to God’s good self by the pronoun “she”, although I think that our traditional Christian readings of scripture [...]
One exercise I have sometimes set both students and groups of adult learners is thinking what we mean by salvation. They have to say what we are saved from, but they are not allowed, initially, to use the answer “sin”. (At a later stage of the exercise we move on to allow the use of [...]
There’s a useful post on Better Bibles about the imperfection of human communication. Richard Rhodes notes that:
Language is always vague. It’s just precise enough to solve the speaker’s communicative problem. In everyday life this is mostly below notice. We spend so much time surrounded by people who are on the same wavelength that we don’t [...]
This post on the Logos blog is clearly a marketing puff. But it wishes to advertise reverse interlinear translations as a way of learning Greek and Hebrew, though I fear it may promote them as a substitute. How far will this approach take you?
Apart from the convenience of a rare example where the word [...]
I’ve followed many of Suzanne McCarthy’s posts on inclusive language issues on Better Bibles with interest, together with some of the related debates about gender roles. I have to confess that the terms of the arguments sometimes seemed rather distant and very North American. After my recent post on egalitarianism and complementarianism, her comments about [...]
John Hobbins has a great post on How to Use a Hebrew Dictionary. In fact, apart from his third point (on words grouped according to their root) everything he says is applicable to any other language, including Greek. Best quote:
A great Arabic lexicographer once said that every word in Arabic has four meanings: its primary meaning; [...]
One of the blogs I enjoy is Separated by a Common Language, exploring the differences between American and British English usages, and along with that some inevitable cultural differences. By coincidence, immediately after reading it today, I read Mark Goodacre’s post on the invisibility of the Farrer theory in the US. While the two-source hypothesis [...]
