Tag Archives: Bible

The Most Intimately Divine Word in the Bible

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Holy is the most intimately divine word in the Bible. It is that in God which marks him off as God. To say that he is holy is to say that he is God. Holiness, in Scripture, is the fundamental attribute of God that conditions and qualifies all other attributes.

Tom Trevethan, The Beauty of God’s Holiness, p. 13

10 Biblical Figures and their Olympic Sports

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With the London 2012 Summer Olympics in full swing, one’s thoughts naturally turn to certain topics, such as “Would St. Paul have been better at track or fencing?”

To save you the time, I’ve assembled a helpful list of men and women from the Bible and matched them with the appropriate Olympic sport.

Gold Medalists

Let’s start with the people who would have been good at their sports.

  1. David – Hammer Throw. This seems like the most similar to using a sling, right?
  2. Samson – Weight Lifting. Too easy.
  3. Joseph – 100m Sprint. Joseph, of dreamcoat fame, was so fast that he could run out of his own clothes.
  4. Mark – 200m Sprint. Ditto. Seriously, what is up with guys in the Bible running out of their clothes?
  5. Deborah – Judo. You didn’t want to mess with Deborah. 
  6. Peter – Swimming (100m Freestyle). I don’t know how fast a Galilean boat full of fish could move, but Peter’s swimming victory still seems impressive.
  7. Miriam – Steeplechase. Staying close to your baby brother’s Nile-borne basket couldn’t have been easy.

The Runners-Up

But not everyone’s a winner in the Olympics. So here are a few less-than-triumphant competitors.

  1. King Saul – Javelin. He doesn’t seem to have been the most skilled with this weapon, which was good for David.
  2. Jonah – Diving. With everything else Jonah did wrong, the least he could have done is jumped overboard himself.
  3. Absalom – Equestrian (any event). If you can’t even ride a mule without getting your hair caught in a tree, I wouldn’t recommend dressage. Though the hats might have helped.

Do you have any suggestions to add?

Noll and Enns on Theological Diversity and Christian Unity

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This quote expresses some of my recent thinking to an eery extent:

So if we find ethical, theological, and historical diversity in Scripture, we begin with the assumption that what the Bible intends for us to learn is not primarily concerned with textual unity or precise moral consistency as construed by modern ethicists, theologians, and historians. Rather, “The unity of the Bible is more subtle but at the same time deeper. It is a unity that should ultimately be sought in Christ himself, the living Word…”

Mark Noll, Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind, p. 139, quoting Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament.

Of course, this leads to several important questions: How much theological or historical disharmony can be tolerated? How much unity should we require for fellowship or organizational structures? What do we do with ethics or theologies that oppose each other? Nonetheless, I think Noll and Enns are on to something important here.

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Why You and I Could Not Write the Book of Revelation

The book of revelation has about 400 verses, and scholars say those verses contain around 550 allusions to Old Testament passages.

But here’s the thing, John doesn’t include a single quotation of the Old Testament. He only uses allusions. This means that his writing, his thoughts, his spirituality literally bleeds with an deep, abiding knowledge of the Scriptures.

via John Dyer