Scot McKnight's Blog

Melissa Steffan, at CT: That last paragraph is a whole world of concern. 77 percent of tithers reported giving between 11 and 20 percent of their income, and 70 percent donate based on their gross (not net) income. The majority (63 percent) started tithing 10 percent or more between childhood and their twenties. Moreover, it [...]

From Grace Liu: My parents are immigrants from Taiwan. I was an only child, and I was expected to excel academically and extracurricularly. So, I delivered. I got straight A’s. I played violin for hours. I did extra math, chemistry and physics problem sets under the eagle-eyed gaze of my mother. Through it all, I [...]

How did the Judeans in the era around Jesus negotiate with the Roman powers and the Judean powers? We might need to begin with the observation that they had to since Rome’s power was pervasive and, if need be, brutal. In 63 BC Pompey the Great was sent to the eastern Mediterranean to calm things [...]

The following is from my new e-book,A Long Faithfulness: The Case for Christian Perseverance. The aim of this book is to present how the warning passages in Hebrews teach perseverance and the possibility of genuine apostasy of genuine believers, and this theme is applied to the notion so popular today called “meticulous sovereignty,” that God [...]

Learning to write sound, interesting, sometimes elegant prose is the work of a lifetime. The only way I know to do it is to read a vast deal of the best writing available, prose and poetry, with keen attention, and find a way to make use of this reading in one’s own writing. The first [...]

Genesis 11.1-9 & Acts 2 Speaking a Different Language I studied five years of Latin in high school and four years of German. I can still decline the word for ‘farmer:’acricola, agricolae, agricolam. And I can recall enough German to appreciateIndiana Joneson a deeperlevel. I studied Greek and Hebrew in seminary, and I still know [...]

Almighty God, on this day you opened the way of eternal life to every race and nation by the promised gift of your Holy Spirit: Shed abroad this gift throughout the world by the preaching of the Gospel, that it may reach to the ends of the earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives [...]

Note to Jesus Creed blog readers: I’ve posted all our posts today by 8am because Patheos is updating its systems. Be patient with any glitches today. Thanks. What happens to the Olympic villages and facilities? This is the story of the colossal waste of money, and lots of it … maybe there should be a [...]

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This review comes to us from one of our students at Northern Seminary, Jean Sharp.Book Review of Gender Differences and the Making of Liturgical History: Lifting a Veil on Liturgy’s Past, Teresa Berger In an overly sexualized North American context, it seems quite remarkable that our gendered-bodies could be overlooked. And yet, the disconnection, whether [...]