Back to the Garden

Intro One of the many peculiar graces of my upbringing was the opportunity to grow up in a community that put a high value on reading the Bible. Now, keep in mind, I grew up in a pretty small town, and there weren’t a lot of things to do, but I remember one evening being invited over to my friend’s house where we sat around in a circle and read through the 4 gospels aloud out of a chronological bible my one friend had. Who does that kind of thing? Well, we did. You see, one of the programs our church offered was something called “Bible Quizzing,” and yes, it’s exactly as nerdy as it sounds. Essentially, we were given portions of the new testament every year that we were supposed to memorize. Every week we would learn a new chapter of the material and then every few months we would get together with teams from other churches all across the Prairies for Quiz Meets where we would be tested on our bible memorization. The “game” aspect of quizzing was sort of like “Reach for the Top.” T...

Boersma, Hans. Scripture as Real Presence: Sacramental Exegesis in the Early Church .  Grand                Rapids, MI:Baker Academic, 2017. Hans Boersma's recent book, Scripture as Real Presence  is a valuable work of resourcement (273) for the contemporary upsurge in the Protestant interest in the theological interpretation of Scripture. Boersma's thesis is two-fold: Modern biblical scholarship has bracketed out questions of metaphysics, creating a crisis for dogmatic descriptions of Scripture , AND,  the church should recover the sacramental understanding of the Bible that rests on the Christian Platonism of the Fathers. In my Old Testament Theology course in seminary, one of the assignments we had was for each student to present a snapshot of a different scholar's OT theology. It was a large class (for that school), so we ended up covering around 20 different OT theologies that ranged from the late 19th century to toda...