Seeking the truth...

6  What is that coming up from the wilderness,    like a column of smoke, perfumed with myrrh and frankincense,    with all the fragrant powders of the merchant?  7  Look, it is the litter of Solomon! Around it are sixty mighty men    of the mighty men of Israel,  8  all equipped with swords    and expert in war, each with his sword at his thigh    because of alarms by night.  9  King Solomon made himself a palanquin    from the wood of Lebanon.  10  He made its posts of silver,    its back of gold, its seat of purple; its interior was inlaid with love.    Daughters of Jerusalem,  11    come out. Look, O daughters of Zion,    at King Solomon, at the crown with which his mother crowned him    on the day of his wedding,    on the day of the gladness of his...

I know the trailer has been out for a week now, but now that I've just gotten fully caught up I finally feel like I can comment on it. The main thing that jumped out at me is that we're seeing a shift back in genre. Under the writing of Russell T Davies, Doctor Who was primarily Sci-fi adventure with a few Sci-fi thrillers mixed in. Under Steven Moffat it switched and the show was primarily Sci-fi thriller, and I think there was a good plot reason for this. The big story under Davies was the transformation of the Doctor - his becoming less violent. It's hard to have adventure stories where the Doctor doesn't kill. Under Moffat we've seen a largely non-violent Doctor who is trying to distance himself from his past of killing. I was surprised to see so many seeming adventure stories in the trailer (especially the Dalek epic). It will be interesting to see if we have a relapsing Doctor or not (the trailer leads me to think that we will) and if so how (or even if) the...

Martinus de Boer's commentary on Galatians came out too late for me to utilize it when I blogged through Galatians previously. Now that it's out, I figured I'd give reviewing it a whirl. As usual, for general comments on format, see the discussion of the NTL series in my commentary series overview post . This particular volume in the New Testament Library is one of the more detailed in the series. It checks in at a little over 400 pages, making it among the most detailed work since Martyn's commentary in 1997 (the other candidate being Schreiner), and like Martyn's is also written from an apocalyptic perspective. de Boer begins with a brief introduction (especially considering the overall size of the commentary) canvassing all of the typical introductory matters. For those interested, he opts for a fairly early date and a northern Galatian hypothesis. The commentary proper is very detailed. de Boer assesses how each sentence fits into the larger Pauline argum...

I've been debating whether or not to blog through the rest of his work on Romans. The problem is that it's very difficult to blog through it at the 20,000 foot level and blogging through in detail will take me forever on my limited schedule. Perhaps at some future date I will decide to blog through Romans, at which point I'll wrestle with the book more. I do want to spend more time working through his way of reading Paul, so something will appear at some point. I'll leave you with this major thought from the rest of the book. According to Campbell, what's at stake is the issue of agency in salvation. He's thoroughly Christological. Much of his time is spent arguing that the faith vs. works antithesis is not an antithesis of opposites. It's not opposing human faith vs. human works (as in no effort vs. effort), but Christ's faith vs. human works. If you were to ask Campbell how one is saved, he would say, 'by Jesus.' Only Jesus can liberate. T...