Divinity United

Yesterday we had a reception for two of my colleagues in the history department here at Tyndale. They both published books this year. Ian Gentles is a Cromwell scholar and has published a biography of Cromwell this year entitled: Cromwell: God's Warrior and the English Revolution . Brad Faught, who has published numerous works on the British Empire (and has another book coming out in the near future), has published The New A-Z of Empire: A Concise Handbook of British Imperial History. If I only had more time to read books that I want to read!

Timothy George has an excellent article on the shift in biblical interpretation toward theological exegesis and history of interpretation/reception history in the March 2011 First Things . The article is entitled 'Reading the Bible with the Reformers: We ought to read Scripture the way Luther and Calvin did' and is not so much about Luther and Calvin as it is about renewed interest in the importance of theological hermeneutics and the avoidance the Enlightenment division between academic study Scripture and the devotional study of Scripture. Early in the article, George addresses the problem of 'biblical presentism' in which the main focus of biblical interpretation is to answer the question: 'What is the Bible saying to us now?' George traces this perspective to Friedrich Schleiermacher and argues that the Protestant acceptance the historical-critical method of biblical interpretation was a response to this sort of feeling-centered, biblical presentism. But ...