Divinity United

The Wycliffe Centre for Scripture and Theology: Fall 2012 Colloquium takes places tomorrow October 19, 2012 at Leonard Hall, Wycliffe College, University of Toronto. The topic of the day is "Scripture and the 'Rule of Faith': The Relationship of Fundamental Scriptural and Theological Norms in the Early Church and Beyond." The line of speakers includes: The Very Rev. Dr. John Behr Dr. D. Jeffrey Bingham Dr. Mark Elliott Rev. Dr. Christopher Seitz For more information see the Wycliffe College website . 

The Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity Conference organized by Chris Keith and Anthony Le Donne and hosted by United Theological Seminary and the University of Dayton in Dayton, Ohio, took place on October 4 and 5. It was a great conference. I am always a fan of smaller conferences where there is more interaction and discussion on a single topic and the related issues. The core of the conference were presentations by the contributors to the volume edited by Keith and Le Donne and bearing the same title as the conference. Each paper was an argument against the basic premise of each of the criteria of authenticity as they have been used in historical Jesus studies. You can read the book to get the details and you can read Mark Goodacre's blog for the play by play ( Oct 4 and 5 ). There is a question as to what the demise of the criteria of authenticity means for historical Jesus study and whether their demise is eminent. While many of the presenters highlighted th...

"...the greatest hope for Christian learning in our age, or in any age, lies not primarily in heightened activity, in better funding, or in strategizing for the tasks at hand--though all these matters play an important part. Rather, the great hope for Christian learning is to delve deeper into the Christian faith itself. And going deeper into the Christian faith means, in the end, learning more of Jesus Christ."  Mark A. Noll, Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind,  22.

News just broke Tuesday in the New York Times on the appearance of an ancient papyrus that speaks about Jesus as possibly having a wife. The papyrus has been dated to the fourth century. Karen King who has presented the only known information about the fragment has pointed out that it may have been composed in the second century. According to Christian Askeland , the majority of Coptologists (the fragment is written in Coptic) seem to think at this time that the document is a forgery (see also the comments to Christian's post). See further information here , including comments from Simon Gathercole who is a specialist on apocryphal gospels. A high resolution image and a translation of the document may be found in the NY Times article.

"It is at the cost of a vast outlay of time and of vast discomfort to the ears of others that we win such praise as this: 'What a learned man you are!' Let us be content with this recommendation, less citified ( rusticore ): 'What a good man you are!'" (372-73 [v. 2, 88.38-39]).

"...we use the terms 'college' and 'university' inchangeably. 'She went to Michigan,' we say, or 'he goes to Oberlin'--not bothering with the noun that follows the name, as if a college and a university were the same thing. They are not. They are, to be sure, interconnected (most college teachers nowadays hold an advanced university degree), and a college may exist as a division or 'school' within in university. But a college and a university have--or should have--different purposes. The former is about transmitting knowledge of and from the past to undergraduate students so that they may draw upon it as a living resource in the future. The latter is mainly an array of research activities conducted by faculty and graduate students with the aim of creating new knowledge in order to supercede the past."    --   Andrew Delbanco, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 2. The terminolog...

I recently finished reading Susan VanZanten's, Joining the Mission: A Guide for (Mainly) New Faculty (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), and I can guarantee that it will not be the last time I read it.  Joining the Mission is primarily directed toward faculty who are about to or have recently begun teaching at "one of the nine hundred religiously affiliated colleges or universities in the United States, which collectively enroll abour 1.5 million students annually" (vi). While providing the most advice for new faculty, there is plenty of career advice for those who have been teaching at one of these institutions for most of their careers. VanZanten's title derives from one of her arguments: that faculty need to join the mission of the institution at which they teach. The chapter titles are as follows: 1. What is a Mission-Driven Institution? 2. A Very Brief History of Western Higher Education 3. Teaching: Call and Response 4. Teaching: Brick by Brick 5. The Fai...