Emerging from Babel: A Bible Blog of Interest

Stephen (aka Q) sees his blog as a vehicle for investigating the potential of narrative and rhetorical criticism as aids in the exposition of Scripture. A Walter Brueggemann fan and a Paul Ricoeur fan, he is clearly well-read and able and willing to converse with both liberals and evangelicals on a variety of issues.

A good example of Q’s ability to think outside the box is the series of posts in which he argues that the synoptic Gospels capture the very “voice” of Jesus (his ipsissima vox) – a position that Joachim Jeremias staked out with great care – and that Jesus predicted the arrival of the kingdom of God during his lifetime. Go here and here. The first position is resisted by those like Bultmann who, on theological grounds, wouldn’t know what to do with a historical Jesus if he had one; the second position is resisted by liberals appalled by a Jesus who expected God to bring the world as he and his contemporaries knew it to a violent close and by conservatives unable to accept that Jesus’s knowledge of how things would enfold was limited and subject to correction in the light of subsequent events. I broach this last topic here and here.

Keep on trucking, Stephen! Let the dogmatic chips fall where they may! It is better to be guilty of expounding scripture in a way that respects what it says than to refrain from doing so in the interests of defending a theological system.