From the email promotion:

Whether you are familiar with Dr. Craig Keener or this is your first introduction to his work, we are delighted to announce an upcoming Bible webinar with the professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary.

Well-known for his research on the Jewish and Greco-Roman context of the New Testament, Dr. Keener will join us for a two-day online seminar to teach us more about the Jewish context of key books and passages of the Bible. It will be a wonderful teaching series that you will not want to miss!

Here is the fourth and final session, entitled “The Jewish Context for the Book of Revelation.”

Image: Patrick Fore

From the email promotion:

Whether you are familiar with Dr. Craig Keener or this is your first introduction to his work, we are delighted to announce an upcoming Bible webinar with the professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary.

Well-known for his research on the Jewish and Greco-Roman context of the New Testament, Dr. Keener will join us for a two-day online seminar to teach us more about the Jewish context of key books and passages of the Bible. It will be a wonderful teaching series that you will not want to miss!

Here is the second session, entitled “The Jewish Context for the Sermon on the Mount and the Book of Matthew Continued.”

Image: Patrick Fore

 
Session 3: The Jewish Context For The Gospel Of John
 
Session 4: The Jewish Context for the Book of Revelation

From the email promotion:

Whether you are familiar with Dr. Craig Keener or this is your first introduction to his work, we are delighted to announce an upcoming Bible webinar with the professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary.

Well-known for his research on the Jewish and Greco-Roman context of the New Testament, Dr. Keener will join us for a two-day online seminar to teach us more about the Jewish context of key books and passages of the Bible. It will be a wonderful teaching series that you will not want to miss!

Here is the first session, entitled “The Jewish Context for the Sermon on the Mount and the Book of Matthew.”

Image: Patrick Fore

Session 3: The Jewish Context For The Gospel Of John
 
Session 4: The Jewish Context for the Book of Revelation

When does a girl become a woman? What does it mean to be a woman, as opposed to a girl? Likely, there are a variety of answers to these questions and perhaps just as much confusion. The author, not fitting the stereotypical pattern of married with children like the majority of women in church she knew, wanted to understand what it meant to be a woman when she didn’t identify with these particular life choices. Amy Davis Abdallah discovered the answers for herself and developed a rite of passage to help young women discover their own answers. This book is the fruit of her research and serves as a kind of workbook for women in all walks of life.

Rites generally are intended to transition individuals from one position or place in society to another. “The role of a rite of passage into womanhood is to create opportunities for girls to gain knowledge, skills, and the disposition that seeks maturity and development in these relationships” (p. 6). Moreover, Abdallah writes, “Mature Christian womanhood is realized through relationship, since the rites [emphasize] relationship with God and others” (p. 6). The premise of both the book and the rite is that a Christian woman should know when and how she becomes a woman. Thus, the rite of passage is for girls becoming women, but is also particularly helpful for women who are unsure of when they can call themselves woman. Nevertheless, the book isn’t intended just for women but also for men who want to understand and empower the women in their lives.

Charles Carrin: I had a specific God-instruction to write a “charismatic catechism” for the benefit of Spirit-filled believers who had no such resource. I began working and the book assumed the nature of a theological-treatise. There are 300 questions and answers on a progression of 18 sub-topics, beginning with “Who Is God?,” and including questions about the Kingdom, the Church, the Bible, Mankind, Israel, Church History, Spiritual Gifts, the Devil/Demons, and Significant People. A beneficial feature of the book is that it can be opened at any page and the reader can begin studying a “capsule” of important Christian truth. The period of study can effectively be three minutes or three hours.

PneumaReview.com: Whom do you feel will benefit the most from this book?

Charles Carrin: There is something for every age and specialty-interest. Youth, middle-aged, seniors, will find an introduction to the Bible, Christianity, church history, and other important information. It will be of special help to the new Christian who is just beginning their learning process of Kingdom facts, or the long-time believer who needs to re-fresh his Christian education.

PneumaReview.com: How did you select the subjects that you included in the book?

Spirit-Empowered Theology (Chosen, 2017).

Charles Carrin: There were two motivations: A Catechism contains a progression of theological and historical topics. The format reads in an expanding way. One topic leads into another and as far as possible I pursued that development of thought. Themes were chosen in the hope that readers would continue pursuing them beyond the Catechism. Secondly, I prayed, seeking God’s direction for the fields I covered.

PneumaReview.com: Why did you include entries about things outside of the Bible, such as events and people in post apostolic church history?

Charles Carrin: I have been in ordained ministry almost 70 years and have had opportunity for long-range observations of strengths and failures among believers. Most Christians, including many pastors, are woefully uninformed about their own church history. In brief, I have included such historical facts as Emperor Theodosius decreeing in 380 A.D. that only those churches accepting Imperial endorsement and known as Roman Catholic would be recognized as official. All others would be heretic. Modern Christians need to know that there were more Bishops who boycotted this decree than accepted it. Even so, the minority was declared “official” and the others heretic. My hope is that the reader will be motivated to explore the church’s historical field far beyond what I have written. Most Protestants are unaware of their own antiquity.

Craig S. Keener discusses volume one of his new commentary, Acts: An Exegetical Commentary: Introduction and 1:1-2:47 (Baker Academic, 2102). Part of the Seedbed series from Asbury Theological Seminary.

Craig S. Keener discussing his commentary on Acts at the 2014 Society for Pentecostal Studies symposium.

Kelly M. Kapic, A Little Book for New Theologians: Why and How to Study Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2012), 126 pages.

Kelly Kapic, Professor of Theological Studies at Covenant College, instructs the student of theology and offers a perspective of wisdom. As the name implies, it is a little book; my first leisurely reading took less than two hours, which is a welcome sign for any novice of theological studies. However, while it is small in size and pages, it is rich and understandable in content. Kapic drops the names of more than fifty theologians and includes a very brief quote from each; quotes that generally emphasize the heart-changing aspect of theology, rather than the intellectual-enrichment or argument-building aspects of theology.

“One of the great dangers of theology is making our faith something we discuss, rather than something that moves us.” –Kelly Kapic

I write this review as a Pentecostal Bible College professor who is always looking for textbooks for his students and I think I have found one here. This is one textbook that should be required reading for the first week of any first college theology course, because it sets the stage with wise advice. Kapic writes, “One of the great dangers of theology is making our faith something we discuss, rather than something that moves us” (64). He counsels the reader to keep faith, reason, and lived experience braided together in order that the student might not become arrogant, argumentative, or disassociated from how authentic theological ideas should inform our lived-out faith. The overarching theme Kapic presents can be viewed as a philosophical how-to approach to the study of theology. He emphasizes the importance of humility, as the principle prerequisite for the study of God, because our understanding will always be less than perfect. In this regard, he urges the student-reader to stretch the boundaries of the understanding to make room for the theological tensions that suspend theological ideas, often times frustrating our human desire to know in full; he challenges us to humbly make room for the mystery of God. Likewise, he also challenges the freshman theologian to be careful to not take their head-filled knowledge back home to sit in judgment of the their lowly church or Sunday school classrooms, as if they now have gained a much superior intellectual vantage point in one short semester. He challenges us all that genuine theology is found more in virtue than in knowledge.

Reviewed by John R. Miller

Publisher’s page: www.ivpress.com/cgi-ivpress/book.pl/code=3975

J. Ross Wagner, Reading the Sealed Book: Old Greek Isaiah and the Problem of Septuagint Hermeneutics (Baylor University Press/Mohr-Siebeck, 2014), 308 pages, ISBN 9781602589803.

Reading the Sealed Book aims to bring together the academic fields of Translation Studies and Biblical Studies to help us better understand the choices made by the translator(s) of Isaiah from Hebrew to Greek in the Septuagint Bible. The Septuagint is important for two reasons. Not only is it the earliest written translation of the Old Testament into any other language but, if New Testament quotations of the Old Testament are anything to go by, it was also the Bible of common use in the early days of the church. Understanding the translation choices made by the Septuagint translators therefore offers great potential to bring us closer to the approach to Scripture used by the early Church.

J. Ross Wagner’s argument is that we can apply approaches from Translation Studies to help us interpret these choices, including the translator’s reasons for making them. This would seem a promising approach, especially since most current discussion of Bible translation seems to be still entrenched in debates around types of “equivalence” and the well-worn “free” vs. “literal” debate, which have long been abandoned in Translation Studies. The precise approach adopted by Prof Wagner is Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS), which treats the translation as a text in its own right, only turning to the “assumed source text” (Toury 2012, p.99ff) when and if the particular research questions requires it. This means that it is possible within DTS to study translation choices without any reference to the source texts at all, since this could be done by comparing texts which present themselves as different translations of the same source text.

This is relevant for Wagner’s book not just because he claims to be using DTS in his study but because it suggests a shift in focus from the traditional arguments about accuracy towards understanding how the text was shaped by its community. This is where terms like “acceptability” (Wagner 2013, pp.227–234)[1] come into play, underlining that every translation is created for a person or group of people whose expectations will necessarily be taken into account by the translator. The Septuagint is no exception to this principle.

Wagner’s book follows a very simple structure, introducing the problem and historical background in the first chapter, before providing a clear exposition of the theories involved in the second. The third and fourth chapters are by far the longest and contain a close examination of the Septuagint version of Isaiah 1. Here, readers will find an exhaustive analysis of the translation choices made in this chapter and their possible rationales and effects. Unfortunately, this analysis bears much more resemblance to traditional source/target text comparisons than to what most researchers in Translation Studies would understand as DTS. It is perhaps no accident that it is in those places where the author does lean more towards what would traditionally be thought of as DTS (eg. pp. 216-217, 224-225) that the analysis provides some of the most thought-provoking details on how the translation would have been received by its first readers.

Trajectories in the Book of Acts is an anthology of fifteen essays by fifteen different writers in honor of John Wesley Wyckoff, who in 2010, completed thirty-four years as Professor of Bible and Theology at Southwestern Assemblies of God University in Waxahachie, where he is still actively teaching. Wyckoff re-introduced biblical hermeneutics into the curriculum in 1978 and laid great emphasis upon the teaching of Biblical Theology. During his tenure, Wyckoff has taught extensively on the New Testament book of Acts and it has became the subject of much of his work in biblical interpretation. It is by virtue of his great attention to Acts that the essayists chose their title. By the use of the term “trajectories” the different writers refer to the paths or “lines of development” that Wyckoff followed to make clear Luke’s intent when he wrote Acts of [the] Apostles.

The different contributors are both former students of Wyckoff and fellow academic colleagues both within and without the Assemblies of God affiliation of which Wyckoff is an ordained minister. Byron D. Klaus, the President of Assemblies of God Theological Seminary in Springfield, Missouri, supplies a forward to the work edited by Alexander, May, and Reid, all former students of Wyckoff.

This reviewer does not know John W. Wyckoff personally, he is well familiar with his reputation as a skilled biblical interpreter and with his seminal work, Pneuma and Logos: The Holy Spirit in Biblical Hermeneutics (Wyckoff’s Ph.D. dissertation, originally). It is also difficult to ascertain which of the essays written by former students reflect Wyckoff’s own investigations and lectures in the area of biblical interpretation. There are statements honoring Wyckoff’s work but nothing said about his influence upon their own personal reflections. There is no question about the inspiration he left upon those writers.

Chapter one, written by Brue E. Rosdahl, furnishes a brief biography of Wyckoff and supplies a summary of Wyckoff’s subsequent ministry and theological “positions” leading to his eventual concentration in biblical theology and biblical hermeneutics. Wyckoff holds to basic “reformed” convictions: the unity of the Biblical witness, its covenantal theme, and the sovereignty of Christ Jesus along with the leading power of the Holy Spirit in faith and life.

In one way or another, all the essays explore avenues of biblical interpretation that Wyckoff opened up in understanding Luke’s intentions when he related the spread of the gospel in Acts of [the] Apostles. The one exception is the contribution by Roger Stronstad, a good friend of Wyckoff’s who has taught for many years at Regent College and Summit Pacific College, both in British Columbia. Stronstad reiterated his perception of the Baptism in the Holy Spirit, as recorded by Luke in Acts, as having more of a vocational significance than a soteriological one. He first expressed this understanding in his 1984 book The Charismatic Theology of St. Luke (Hendrickson, 1984, pp. 1,12,83). Other essays opened some doors of understanding not before apparent to this reviewer and forcing this reviewer to re-read both Luke and Acts. A former student of Wyckoff’s, Mario Escabedo II, who, himself teaches at Southwestern Assembly of God University, explored Luke’s ecphrastic vocabulary and phraseology which has a visual effect as much as it has an acoustical or auditory one. Rob Starner, also a colleague of Wyckoff and Escabedo at SAGU, investigated passages in Luke, Acts, and Hebrews that were not just similar to each other but were triplicates of each other. Starner proposes that Luke and Paul were both co-laborers and collaborators.

Mark Driscoll, A Book You Will Actually Read On Church Leadership (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008), 96 pages, ISBN 9781433501371

Christians and even churches seem to find traditional NT leadership issues a bit boring, if not irrelevant, to modern church culture. An ever increasing trend in developing leadership teams is to adapt a more corporate style of government and move away from traditional modes for elders and deacons focusing more on the essence of leadership than structure. On Church Leadership presents a conservative, traditional viewpoint with a contemporary paradigm that weaves in a value of leadership involving more than qualifications and organizational charts. And it’s short, just 76 pages between the intro and the ample appendix. No fluff here.

Knowing a bit about author Mark Driscoll, pastor of the large and growing Mars Hill Church in Seattle, will enhance appreciation for his point of view. Driscoll is on the leading edge of being Reformed and relevant, a hip version of Spurgeon ala Urban Outfitters with a matching church culture. What you will see through the pages, beginning with Jesus, is a description of elders as spiritual leadership, deacons as assistants who oversee material and practical affairs and clearly defined membership requirements.The chapter on leadership teams lays out the dynamics of prophet, priest and king mixed in with “air war” and “ground war” paradigms. Other offerings include a question and answer section and a sample of the Mars Hill membership covenant.

Another item, surely to raise more than eyebrows, is Driscoll’s extensive chapter (more than a fourth of the book) on the role of women in leadership. He does not see the Bible supporting any role for women as pulpit teachers or in the ranks of elder and at the same time does see women filling the deacon role. That chapter alone is worthy of a substantial review and I suggest you read it for yourself.

Notably absent from the material is discussion on roles of five fold ministry gifts (Eph 4) particularly as they relate to leadership functions and structure. While there are several paragraphs in the question and answer section that marginally address his view of an apostle, more inclusive commentary and clarity would be helpful. According to his website at www.theresurgence.org, Driscoll does believe in the charismatic gifts but it’s clear he wouldn’t identify with some segments of the contemporary charismatic church.

From the recent plant to the well established church and to those struggling with church leadership issues, this book is worth a look. Contemporary methodology from the pulpit to the pew can produce strong numbers but weak churches. Driscoll challenges leaders to maintain a conservative biblical basis and a culturally relevant mindset. You may not find consensus with everything presented but there is a wealth of resources for practical insight and implementation to aid leaders in developing or restructuring a solid framework for effective ministry.

Reviewed by Ron Messelink

Publisher’s page: www.crossway.org/books/on-church-leadership-tpb/

As of May 31, 2014, the full digital version of A Book You Will Actually Read On Church Leadership is available at: http://theresurgence.com/files/2011/04/11/OnChurchLeadership_MarkDriscoll.pdf