Esau McCaulley says his church, the black church in America, has something to say

Yesterday, I finished Esau McCaulley's book Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope. IVP Academic. 2020. McCaulley's bona fides are beyond question. He has a PhD from St. Andrews. His Doktorvater is N. T. Wright. He teaches New Testament at Wheaton College. He is a priest in the ACNA. He is a black man and a Christian. This is a book McCaulley was born to write. And it is a book with a message: the South got somethin' to say.

These notes are not a book review. Rather, they are a short treatment of some of his ideas. Nevertheless, if you have never read his book, I do recommend it. The faculty and staff of my alma mater, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, read it together. That encouraged me to pick it up; it took five years to find a cheap copy bc I'm a cheapie. Plus, I am very interested in looking at the faith through the eyes of non-white people.

Chapter One: The South got Somethin' to Say

As he grew up, McCaulley found himself caught between two communities in the Black church. One of these was evangelical scholasticism and the academy. The other, social justice and the pulpits. He appreciated the serious scholarship of the former, but its papers and commentarites "displayed little concern for how biblical texts speak to the experiences of Black believers" (12). He also thought they read for a white audience, if they even made it out of the first century. "To me, it was a sign of privilege to imprison Paul and Jesus in the first century (13). But what about the social justice side? Here, scholarship was viewed with suspicion. Getting the exegesis right and whiteness have often gone hand in hegemonic hand. Wasn't exegesis the tool of white churches seeking to baptize slavery in the first place? McCaulley cedes the point but disagrees. Looking at the earliest strate of Black ecclesial leadership, he finds plenty of exegesis--and a thoroughgoing message of liberation and freedom.

As McCaulley argues, God is a liberator. Liberation erupts from God's very character, from out of and to his ontological sabbath shalom.[1] God desires freedom for his people. And his expectation is that his freed people will live lives of holiness, living out their liberation before the world. They participate in God's continual and peaceful call. Any reading of the Bible that says otherwise is in error. Scholarship and justice pick up the liberating cross together in whatever historical situation it is found and partner with one another to discern the mind of Christ for this day.

Handpicking other points of interest

McCaulley goes in for re-examing texts used historically to subdue and subjugate Black Christians. Eschatology is on his mind, the kind of eschatology that bubbles up into every living moment. Eschatology stimulates the church to act for justice and for liberation against the horizon ofeventual and certain shalom. But eschatology is also "not yet." And, in the intervening time, there is mourning.

Speaking of the Sermon on the Mount, McCaulley writes, "To mourn involves being saddened by the state of the world. To mourn is to care. It is an act of rebellion against one's own sins and the sins of the world. . . A theology of mourning never allows us the privilege of apathy. . . Mourning is intuition that things are not right--that more is possible. To think that more is possible is an act of political resistance in a world that wants us to believe that consumption is all there is. Our politicians run on our desires by convincing us that utopia is possible here and they alone can provide it." (65) I do also like his emphasis that this mourning leads to a hope to see elements of the Kingdom of God come to be, its liberation unto justice. And that this involves telling truth. As Luther said, A theologian calls a thing what it is. "Peacemaking is a sign of God's inbreaking kingdom. . . . Through our efforts to bring peace, we show the world the kind of king and kingdom we represent. . . . Therefore the work of justice, when understood as direct testimony to God's kingdom, is evangelistic from start to finish." (Ibid.)

I am caught by this: "For Zecharaiah and Elizabeth, the miracle child is John. For the African American Christian, the miracle is the Black Church born of truly miraculous circumstances and whose witness to Jesus has served as something of a forerunner preparing America to accept a truer and fuller gospel" (84). This fuller gospel is one that, while grounded in respectful and canonically comprehensive exegesis, includes the necessary hermeneutic to place those exegetic results in dialogue with today. Preaching is a public gift of the Black Church.

McCaulley reads with the end in mind. His work is eschatological. He understands the Christian vision of the future--the liberated, risen church--as one that embraces difference: difference of skin, of language, of culture. "These distinct people, cultures, and languages are eschatological everlasting. At the end, we do not find the elimination of difference. Instead the very diversity of cultures is a manifestation of God's glory. . . . Our distinctive cultures represent the means by which we give honor to God. He is honoered through the diversity of tongues singing the same song." (118) Liberation does not lead to the removal of color, thinking of people who claim to not see color. That approach to difference is well-meant, perhaps, but incorrect. "The gospel does not cancel ethnic identities.(113)"

So when McCaully approaches scripture, he considers it in its historical-grammatical context and he considers it eschatologically.[2] In the Easter light, as von Balthasar said. So, he weds the careful tools of the evangelicals with the social energy of the progressives.

Laws of restraint suggest an eschatological purpose

McCaully discusses a way of reading Biblical ethics that I found very helpful. Referencing Jesus's teaching on divorce, McCaully observes that Jesus brings ethics back to creational intent. Let's call this the creational ethic. But, Jesus acknowledges that the law does exist to restrain error. Paul does the same when he says the law is the paidagogos. The law makes pastoral sense of difficult situations. Let's call this pastoral consideration.

Applying this to the slavery question in America. The Bible's teaching around slavery is pastoral consideration. Its teachings limit the worst aspects of slavery. And, as they do their work, they erase the foundation that supports the sinful institution itself. They do this because the creational intent--the deeper ethic--is liberation-unto-freedom. God made all human beings to be his imago in the world. So the limiting effort of the law serves a temporary purpose guided by the deeper and eventually overcoming liberation of eschatological reality, in this case, a free people worshiping God's messiah together.

Scars suffered in the present do not prevent eschatological participation

Finally, there is McCaulley's discussion of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8. Christ is our reconciler, our liberator to shalom in the Kingdom of God. One would not have thought a eunuch could ever be liberated. Weren't his public wounds permanent? He was not only a a Gentile, but he was permanently impure by the nature of his injury. As McCulley reminds his reader: eunuch's were despised. The man suffered the injustice of castration from the community at large, and "in a culture with strictly defined gender roles, he would be seen as aberrant" (110). But the eunuch is in fact liberated. He "found hope in the shamed Messiah whose resurrection lifts those with imposed indignities to places of honor." And "The eunuch [was always] an image bearer [of God]. Christ showed the eunuch who he truly was." McCaully's point is that blackness, like castration, does not prevent Jesus's liberating act from fully delivering black men and women to wholeness, dignity, and value in the Kingdom of God, to "God's eschatological vision for the reconciliation of all things in his Son." Christ's redemption is a liberating act for all people who for whatever reason suffer indignity and shame. Christ has made a place for them all in the kingdom.

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[1] I hope one sees the divine mission underneath this mention of liberation.
[2] cf Theology Along Three Axes

Six ways the Bible contributes to philosophical ethics

Ethical philosopher Dr. Arthur F. Holmes suggests six contributions the Bible makes to philosophical ethics.

1. It gives a theological basis for our [Christian] moral obligation, in terms of our obligation to the will of God, the creator and lawgiver.
2. It gives an account of the relation of morality to God's purposes in creation, our perversion of those purposes through sin and our restoration to righteous living by the grace of God.
3. It teaches us the principles of justice and love which describe God's character and should also characterize us.
4. It reveals the moral law of God, declaring duties in many areas of human life. This is summarized in the Ten Commandments and spelled out by precept and example throughout Scripture.
5. It demonstrates that from love for God and gratitude for his mercies come the motivation and dynamic for moral living.
6. It depicts the ideals and promise of the kingdom of God that Christ came to establish, first in our hearts and lives and eventually throughout the entire world.

Holmes goes on to say that studying philosophical ethics is right for people informed by the Bible because a framework is needed for evaluating and applying its principles that arise and are applied in different times and places. "We can learn to distinguish universal and unchanging principles that transcend cultural and historical differences from case applications in culturaly variable situations." Ethics can lift itself out of "case applications" and construct a useful framework that brings consistency to today's decision making. This too allows for dialogue across the cultures of our time.

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Arthur F. Holmes. Ethics: Approaching Moral Decisions. Contours of Christian Philosophy. ed. Stephen Evans. 2nd ed. InterVarsity Press. 2007. pp. 16-17.

Chuck Alley of "The Living Church" writes a short description of love

"There is not anything self-serving about God's love. God's love is not an emotion--a good or warm feeling that God has when he thinks of us--because God's love is not emotional but rational. Love is the essence of God. The supreme illustration of God's love as an enacted love is found in John 3:16 . . . . We learn that God's love was manifested in his giving for the good of everyone, regardless of whether they chose to receive the gift. . . . The love of God was revealed to us through his actions. Those actions are taken for our good and without any expectation of return. Love at its heart is an act of grace. It is not dependent upon the worthiness of its target, but simply the need of those on whom it is lavished. In addition, the quality of love is not measured by its effect upon the recipient, but rather on the intent of the lover. Love is not expressed, however, as a kind thought or good feeling toward another. It is an action taken for the best of the neighbor. If we want to love, then we must act. If we wait until we 'feel' love before putting love into action, then it is unlikely we will ever get around to loving. The rational nature of love is revealed by the fact that if we continue to act in love toward other people, we will ultimately find ourselves feeling love for them. Thus, it is not impossible for us to love our enemies or those who persecute us. In fact, love has nothing to do with liking someone. To love is to practice doing what is best for the other person--without any expectation of personal return." (Feb. 16, 2025 p. 40)

Seamus, and me, and evil makes three

So, Seumas Macdonald. He has a newsletter (which are all the rage these days), and in it, he is reading along with James K. A. Smith's On the Road with Saint Augustine. Seamus's April 24 edition quotes Smith quoting Camus and then switches to his own thoughts.

After his talk at the monastery, a priest who was an ex-revolutionary stood during a time of discussion and confronted Camus: “I have found grace, and you, Mr. Camus, I’m telling you in all modesty that you have not.” Olivier Todd, his biographer, recounts: “Camus’s only response was to smile. . . . But he said a little later, ‘I am your Augustine before his conversion. I am debating the problem of evil, and I am not getting past it.’” pp. 178-179

The question of evil is an intractable one. Where does it come from? Why is there evil? Great questions to ask, but devilishly impossible to answer. And I have two comforts in this. Firstly, I do think Christianity provides a better means for wrestling with this question than any other philosophy. Secondly, I think we ought to suspicious of any system of thought that wraps it all up in a nice rational package, ties a bow on top, and says, "there, makes sense, doesn't it?"

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I like Seumas's insight that if we could really solve evil, then it would not be evil at all. As Smith writes, "To make sense of [evil], to have an explanation for it, to be able to identify the cause would mean that it has a place in the world. But then it isn’t evil. Evil is what ought not to be, the disorder of creation, the violation we protest."

This very much reminds me of what I have posted before about what "creation" means. Perhaps these nodes: the incarnation, creation, evil, are the places this drapery of life hangs down from but to which no human beings may climb (save one).

Indeed, speaking as a Christian man, I think that the Bible sets up that problem and does not answer it. Why? Because its answer comes at the end of the story. One knows one is at the end of the story when that question is answered. And one knows who the hero has been all along because only the hero can answer it. Having said this, it puts atheists and self-appointed skeptics to shame because, thinking they have skewered God’s character on a pole, they are simply repeating where we are in the story and claiming they have discovered some secret. It is no secret. It is the plot."

List of Reasons for an Old Earth

Here we go and in no particular order.

1. Evidences of natural time esp. geological and astronomical
2. Fitness of natural selection to explain and predict biological changes
3. Evidence of ancient life / fossil evidence
4. Paucity of the challenges
5. The false-friend of ID (really an attempt to resurrect the Argument from Deisgn or the Teleological Argument. These are not explanatory; we see what we want to see. 
6. The "brain weight" including contemporaries like Francis Collins and John Polkinghorne as well as ancients like Augustine
7. Hermeneutics properly practiced: thinking correctly about how to read ancient documents especially according to time and genre
8. The "very good" of God / God as trustworthy
9. The goodness of matter / natural law and its necessity for confessing the incarnation, the benefit of Jesus's sacrifice, and obtaining a real hope for eschatological deliverance
10. The danger of replacing the theology of the cross with a theology of glory
11. The importance of the Book of Nature
12. Animals need to hope as well
13. The danger that bad thinking poses for the health and growth of the church.

Objections that a friend of mine raised: Radiometric dating -- when does it start? Tampering. Mt. St. Helen's rocks. Slow formation of sediment trees. Logs in Mt St. Helens. Ken Ham and his group-basis for evaluations.

Excerpts from "Matigari ma Njirungi" (The Language of Languages)

I ran across a beautiful book in a bookstore in Lexington, KY last summer. It was published by the University of Chicago and titled The Language of Languages: Reflections on Translation. It is a collection of lectures by Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong'o. His insights leapt from the page that afternoon. Here are a few that spoke to me.

This excerpt is about translation as the emancipating antidote to heirarchies of domination.

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"If we think of culture as the eyes through which a people see the world, the implications of a people being denied their language and having to use the language of [a] dominating power becomes clear. The aim and the result are to make the dominated people look at themselves and their place in the world through the eyes of the dominant social forces. That's why language control has always been at the center of imperial, cultural, and psychological conquests. . . . The language of conquest becomes the language of being. A people so subjected may even come to see their own language as that of non-being. Therefore, for such peoples, language emancipation is a necessary component of psychological emancipation. For, in reality there is no language which is inherently more of a language than any other language; all languages, big and small, are equal in their potentialities.

"If you know all the languages of the world and you don't know your mother tongue or the language of your culture, that is enslavement. But if you know your mother tongue or the language of your culture, and add all other languages to it, that is empowerment.

"In reality it is impossible for any person to know all the languages in their own country, let alone in the world. This is where the art of translation comes in. Translation makes dialogue between languages and cultures and different histories easier and more enriching. I would like to see translation elevated to center stage in relations between languages and cultures. . . . Linguistic emancipation anywhere is central to the emancipation of the mind everywhere (60-61)."

"Hierarchy as a conception of being is more clearly reflected in the relationship between languages. . . . All languages in the world, big and small, have a lot to contribute to the enrichment of our common human culture. . . . Languages and cultures can and should relate in terms of network, not heierarchy. And a network is really a system of give-and-take between equals. Translation is central to this entire system. . . . So I'd like to end by rephrasing Aime Césaire's maxim that cultural contact is the oxygen of civilization with a statement to the effect that language contact through translation is the real oxygen of civilization (70)."

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This excerpt is about language as the cultivation and humanization of nature.

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"Humans translate the language and the laws of nature into those of nurture. Humans are of nature, like plants, animals, air, say ecology, and yet they stand outside it, as it were, act on it and reproduce themselves and give rise to processes which are clearly not identical with the nature of which they are a part. And yet, what humans have achieved is an extension of the various aspects of nature. The most wonderful technological tools are an extension of the human hand. The farthest-seeing telescope is an extention of the eye as are the speediest vehicles--rockets and spaceships for instance--extentions of the leg, the act of walking. And computers--don't they try to imitate the human brian? So the translation of the language of nature into their own tongues has enabled humans to create their nurture out of nature. The nurtural world of the human is an endless reproduction of what obtains in the natural nature and even the word 'cultivate' gives rise to the concept of culture as a social practice. Agriculture and social culture have a common root in the notion of cultivating nature, itself a process of translation from one environment to another.

"In short, the humanization of nature is itself a process of translation and bespeaks of the centrality of translation in the make-up of our human community. Aristotle said that poetry was more universal than history since history dealt with the particulars while poetry dealt with what could be. But there is a way in which we can say that the subject of translation is the universals contained in the particulars of nature and social experience (35)."

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And now the theology:

As I read the above, I cannot help but think of the major places in the Bible where language matters: the Tower of Babel, the miracle at Pentecost, and the image of the church as a numberless multitude of tribes and languages from John's Apocalypse. The first comes from the ancient world. The last comes from the world to be. And the harvest festival is our world today. I want to apply Ngugi wa Thiong'o's meditations to each and see what comes out.

Language and the World that Was

The Dissolution of the Seminaries

Between 1536 and 1540, Henry VIII dissolved all monasteries, convents, priories, and other religious institutions--about fifteen thousand of them across England and Wales. The act unemployed one out of every fifty persons in the population, not to mention gutting the nation's centers of education (literacy and the arts) and charity (especially healthcare and the support of the poor). What had stood for centuries was pulled down in four years. I am tempted to think of it as a disaster--and especially where libraries were lost. But to peoples long fed up with the hoarded riches and power of the ecclesiastical estates, they had it coming. As Roman Catholic historian David Knowles said, "There were far too many religious houses in existence in view of the widespread decline of the fervent monastic vocation, and that . . . the monks possessed too much of wealth and of the sources of production both for their own well-being and for the material good of the economy." When I look at the news coming out of the seminaries and churches of the West, I wonder if what is going on today is a lot like dissolution. And I wonder, did we have it coming too?

Find more statistics at Statista

This graph has a tale to tell: the number of people who are members of a church is declining against a rising number of people who aren't members.[1] The loss of a tithing populace affects churches' abilities to support full-time clergy, which changes how the pastoral ministry is done. And that changes seminary enrollment and the seminary system. Fifty seven percent of schools in the Association for Theological Schools (ATS) report declining enrollment. And for those who do enroll, online work and shorter educational times are in demand. People do not want to take on educational debt and especially when they cannot expect to be supported in full-time in ministry. Therefore, the gold-standard three-year Master of Divinity degree is being replaced by one- or two-year Master of Arts degrees. Seminaries are intentionally dissolving themselves of expensive-to-maintain housing, dormitories, and land and embracing online education. I hardly know what to call it, but I can say that the quiet library stacks, the late-night stress in book-crowded carols, and the mental hum of people literally becoming scholars: all that is going. Maybe we did have it coming.

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[1] In their book The Great Dechurching (Zondervan Academic, 2023) authors Michael Graham and Jim Davis say that America is seeing in real time “the largest and fastest religious shift in U.S. history,” with some 40 million people—1 in 6 Americans—having stopped going to church in the past thirty years. “That’s a lot of people who have changed their rhythms and habits,” Graham said. The losses in church going are greater in number than the people who came to faith during the First Great Awakening, the Second Great Awakening, and all the Billy Graham crusades combined.

[2] For a bit of extra credit, watch this lecture about the dissolution of the monasteries by Massolit. The name of the lecturer is unlisted.

The BDAG Flâneur: Setting Out

A flâneur \FLAN-uhr\ is an urban stroller, lounger, saunterer, or loafer. The word initially carried the idea of wasting time. But with the rise of especially Parisian urban life, it skipped a step. A flâneur wandered through crowds and streets with a detached but aesthetically attuned observation.[1] Honoré de Balzac described flânerie \FLAN-er-ee\, the verbal form, as "the gastronomy of the eye." Victor Fournel, in Ce qu'on voit dans les rues de Paris (What One Sees in the Streets of Paris, 1867), said there was nothing lazy in flânerie. It was a way of understanding the rich variety of the city landscape like "a mobile and passionate photograph" ("un daguerréotype mobile et passioné") of urban experience.

BDAG, unlike a flâneur, cannot walk or observe. It is a book--a lexicon. It is the standard lexicon for scholars interested in the literature of the New Testament. Its full title is A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. It is based in the work of Walter Bauer, but its present revised edition is edited by Frederick William Danker. Put the initials of the two names together and you get BDAG.

If you are a student or scholar in Biblical studies or in the history of Christianity or Second Temple Judaism, you save your pennies to buy this one-thousand-page tome. And you are encouraged to use it. But, at least in my case, I forget to do so. The entries are dense, and I don't have it in electronic form so I have to be with it to use it--no click and it appears a la Logos. Yet, BDAG has been on my mind of late, and I have hit upon an idea.

What if I adopted the relaxed-yet-observant curiosity of the flâneur and go strolling among its pages? Entries would be like stands in a marketplace and shops along a boulevard. What curiosities and sidewalk insights are hidden among its citations? Time, then, to don my shoes, coat, and hat and walk out of doors and into the streets.

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Α, α, τό first letter of the Gk. alphabet alpha Even at this, the very first entry, there are goods to be had. Already we discover letters used as numbers: α' = 1. β' = 2. Perhaps there was no separate system of counting, though mathematics was already well established in the world. The earliest mathematician is Thales of Miletus in fifth century BCE. But math itself goes much further back into time, to the Babylonians and Sumerians. And before them, to the hunter gatherers of the ancient world as evidence by the marks along the Ishango bone.

Civilizations which use letters as numbers, such as the pre-modern Hebrews, limited themselves greatly, as such systems are not given to advanced arithmatic. What such a scheme is good for, however, is gematria where words mean numbers and numbers words. Gematria is a hot bed for kabbalistic mysticism. It is, therefore, no surprise to discover that alpha and omega signify the beginning and the end and everything in between. "The two came to designate the universe and every kind of divine and superhuman power." The alphabet became a secret bag of spells, a master incantation. To know the true name of anything is to know its secrets and its power, and isn't the alphabet the very storehouse of all true names. It is a metaphysical loom joining life, breath, and sound into a technology of infinite combination.

The last gift of this entry is the first Christian use of alpha in the Sartor Square: a five-line palindrome, rendered in Latin, of five words:

When the five-letter Latin words are read in line order horizontally or vertically or backwards or forwards or bottom to top or top to bottom, they mean, The sower, Arepo, holds or works the wheels with care. Another translation is: He who works the plow sows the seed.

Archaeologists and anthropologists have found Sartor squares all over Europe. The earliest example is from the house of Publius Paquius Proculus at Pompeii. And many have been found in overtly Christian locations. The square is found engraved on the facade of the door in the 752 CE Abbey of St.Peter Ad Oratorium near Capestrano, Italy. It is copied in an 822 Carolingian Bible. And in the 1100s, it was inscribed on the masonry of the Church of St. Laurent near Ardeche, France and in the Keep of the Castle of Loches, France. Locations like these had scholars believing that it was a kind of secret symbol for the Christian community, as its letters can be arranged to spell out Pater Noster. But scholars today believe the square comes from earlier in history and was assumed into Christian praxis. There is nothing distinctively Christian in the anagram itself after all. People have arranged its letters to form many other things, including prayers to Satan and formulas for exorcism.

Ἀβαδδών, ὀ The name of the ruling angel in hell. The relevant material is from Revelation 9.11 "ἔχουσιν ἐπ’ αὐτῶν βασιλέα τὸν ἄγγελον τῆς ἀβύσσου· ὄνομα αὐτῷ Ἑβραϊστὶ Ἀβαδδών καὶ ἐν τῇ Ἑλληνικῇ ὄνομα ἔχει Ἀπολλύων." Abbadon is from the Hebrew, as it says, and Apollyon, the Greek, a derivation, says BDAG, from Apollo, source of plagues. One question I have is about the reference to Psalm 87:11. This presents a mystery to me, as Psalm 87 only has seven verses. Now, the Douay-Rheims (1899) has nineteen verses. So, there must be some kind of text critical thing going on. Yet, Calvin and Matthew Henry only comment on seven, and even Google does not know.

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[1] Lots of stealing from Wikipedia going on in this paragraph.

A quick-and-dirty bibliography on Satan

"The Satan of popular imagination, God’s cosmic archenemy and the source of evil, has a long and complex history. Although scholars typically locate this history within the context of ancient Jewish and Christian imaginations, these origins are complicated by a number of factors. Among these are the various uses of the Hebrew noun satan to describe both earthly and cosmic figures and the multiple aliases referring to God’s cosmic opponent in Jewish and Christian literature, including Belial or Beliar, Mastema, Beelzebul, Lucifer, and the Devil, and others. The roots of the character Satan are typically discussed in relation to the Hebrew Bible, although the image of the cosmic opponent emerges most clearly within the writings of early Judaism, in the literature of the Second Temple period (c. 515 BCE–70 CE). Many scholars associate the emergence of this figure with ancient Near Eastern influence on early Judaism. Others highlight it as a response to the problem of evil; Satan and his retinue effectively distance God from acts difficult to reconcile with beliefs about God’s nature. Still others locate the emergence of Satan and satan figures within the context of social movements, arguing that the character of Satan serves as a tool for constructing communal identity and defining opposition.

"Satan, or the Devil or Beelzebul, as a cosmic opponent also plays an important role within the literature of the emerging Christian movement, especially the New Testament texts. In the Gospels the cosmic battle between God and Satan imagined in early Judaism is interpreted in relation to Jesus, whose defeat of Satan is evidenced through exorcism, healing, and resurrection. Although some interpreters contend that the depiction of Jesus as exorcist reflects the historical Jesus’ understanding of his ministry as the eschatological defeat of Satan, others maintain that Jesus’ conflict with Satan should be viewed in terms of his opposition to the Roman Empire. The question of whether or to what extent references to Satan and evil powers should be read as describing political, social, and other human forces permeates scholarship on Paul and Revelation as well.

"Scholarship on Satan appears in a variety of forms, including wide-ranging treatments of the character of Satan across literary and historical contexts; exegetical examinations of specific texts using the terms satan, Belial, and so on; and discussions of Satan in relation to demons, the problem of evil, serpent imagery, and other elements. Many of the latter are intertwined explicitly with theological concerns and questions." ~ from the Oxford Bibliography

Old Testament Biblical Theology

John Walton on Baker Book House blog: view of the accuser in Job.

John Walton on the “Exegetically Speaking” podcast discussing Isaiah 14 and the fall of Satan.

Michael Heiser. Demons: What the Bible Really Says About the Powers of Darkness. Lexham Press. 2020.

• An interview w Heiser on the Apologetics Canada podcast
• A JETS review of the book
• Heiser is probably the author of this short article on Bible names for Satan on the Lexham Press blog as well as this one

Archie T. Wright. Satan and the Problem of Evil: From the Bible to the Early Church Fathers. Fortress Press. 2022.

• Transcript of Heiser’s interview with Archie Wright
• Audio podcast interview with "New Books in Biblical Studies" June 28, 2002 episode 91
• Presentation on June 27, 2020, as part of a Virtual Conference on the NT in Archaeology and Ancient Judaism
• Enoch Seminar video discussion/review on Dr. Wright's book. Feb 9, 2023.

Ryan E. Stokes. The Satan: How God's Executioner Became the Enemy. Eerdman's. 2019.

• Review in Reading Religion
• "The Weird Christian Podcast" interview

Dr. Miriam Brand on the origin of sin and evil in the Second Temple period

John Day writes on the Serpent in the Garden of Eden and Its Background for The Bible and Interpretation

Political Theology
Adam Kotsko. The Prince of This World. Stanford University Press. 2016.

• An interview with Kotsko
• An academic review of this book

Bibliographies
“Satan” in Oxford Bibliographies

A scholar’s bibliography of the subject in the literature of the last few decades

Comment on AI and Theology

The entry "What CHATGPT Reveals about the Collapse of Political/Corporate Support for Humanities/Higher Education" on the blog CrookedTimber.org caught my eye. The changes every field is going through as algorithms become more and more capable is fascinating, and I was reading the various comments. Then I came across this one from Alex SL:

I am a scientist, but I do not to reject the humanities (or, as we would have said back in Germany, the social sciences) as empty nonsense. I believe they generate knowledge, and knowledge worth having.

However, there is clearly a bit of an issue in the way they are taught. I started getting that impression already in what would here be called high school, when it seemed that language teachers forced us to over-analyse novels and plays in a way that seemed rather implausible. But the real eye-opener was the big plagiarism scandal around German politicians in 2011, when it occurred to me that such a scandal would simply not be possible in the natural sciences full stop.

These were by training all historians, economists, political scientists, etc, whose dissertation process consisted entirely of reading thirty books and then writing the thirty-first on the exact same topic. They took the short-cut of copying and pasting some text from their sources and then cosmetically changing a few words, and that was plagiarism. But if they had rearranged sentences more thoroughly, they would have fairly obtained their degrees, and there would not have been any scandal; and, crucially, the amount of new knowledge generated would have been exactly the same, i.e., zilch, nada, zero.

In science, however, a graduate student would have been expected to generate new data. The problem to watch out for is not plagiarism, but manipulation of data to make them more “interesting”.

To me, that points to the solution. What chatGPT cannot do, what no mind will ever be able to do without going out into the lab or into the field and run its own surveys, digs, and experiments, is generate new insights that aren’t in its training set. Surely that is a thing that is still possible to achieve in economics, archaeology, social sciences, anthropology, linguistics, etc.? And if a field cannot have that hope, then one would really have to have a conversation about whether it is something worth teaching. (Whispering: “theology”.)