Andrew Guffey

My review of Experientia, Volume 2 has been posted at the Review of Biblical Literature website.  A brief excerpt: "This volume offers an array of voices to think with, conversation partners to engage for those interested in examining ancient religious experience and the texts that reflected and elicited them. What it lacks in coherence it makes up for in verve. Experimentation may not provide the solid results we might desire, but it might just show us which paths are worth taking and which should remain untrod." If you're interested, read the review .  If you're still interested after that, buy the book here or at Amazon . 

What does Karl Barth have in common with John Wesley, Jacob Taubes, Stanley Hauerwas, and the Coen Brothers?  To find out take a look at what just rolled off the presses at Pickwick.  The Karl Barth Blog Conference of 2010 is now in print, including a modest contribution from myself.  If Barth interests you, you should pick up a copy.  There are some very stimulating essays in the volume.  Travis McMaken has posted the announcement over at DET .  And the book is up on Wipf & Stock's page . 

Among the faithful of the Assyrian Church of the East (ACOE) it is well-known fact that their traditional liturgical language—Syriac—is “the language Jesus spoke.”   (Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic, after all, unlike Greek and Latin.)   Among the faithful of the ACOE it is also a well-known fact that Jesus founded the church in Osrohene (Edessa) in Syria around the year 30 CE in his correspondence with King Abgar V Ukama.   Well, actually the church was more formally established when the apostle Addai was sent to Edessa (either by the apostle Thomas or by Jesus himself) to cure Abgar of his disease after Jesus had been crucified and resurrected.   At any rate, the ACOE was established by Jesus, through the apostles’ authority, immediately after Jesus’ earthly life.   Among the points of pride the faithful of the ACOE tally to their church’s credit, this is among the most important.   Jesus did not correspond with Tiberius Caesar, nor deliberately send an ap...

Luke Timothy Johnson’s Among the Gentiles is an illuminating comparative study.   Johnson’s goal is to demonstrate that although Greco-Roman religion and early Christianity disagreed on many specific beliefs and practices, their ways of being religious (i.e. their approaches to divine power) were fundamentally congruous.    In the first three chapters Johnson addresses the debate to which he hopes to contribute, the method and perspective he follows, and the model he employs.   Tracing the polemic of Christianity against “pagan” religion from the first century CE to the present, Johnson suggests in the first chapter that such debates about the relationship between the two religious complexes have proven unfruitful and not a little dissimulating.   Chapter two outlines a fresh approach to the discussion from the field of religious studies.   Johnson provides a definition of religious experience that understands religion as a collection of human responses to...

"Today, biblical scholarship on deification is more or less dominated by theological discourse and presuppositions.  In this climate, it is tempting to simply focus on Christian forms of deification when treating Paul.  I am convinced, however, that scholars will never understand Paul and deification until they open themselves up to honest historical inquiry about other, larger discourses of deification in the Greco-Roman world.  ...If we are going to achieve a truly historical understanding of deification in the Greco-Roman world (including Christian deification), it seems to me that scholars need to be more sympathetic to ancient forms of thought.  In modern theology, the very way we think about humans and God(s) tends to preclude deification.  ...In this study I try--as best I can--to peer behind centuries of Christian theological discourse about deification.  But the road is hard.  Some of the texts are scattered and unfamiliar.  ...