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Can Christians Read Harry Potter to the Glory of God?
Recently, I had a student in class ask my opinion about whether Christians should read fictional series like Harry Potter. This has been an issue I’ve thought through before. Growing up, I remember hearing people in my church say that the Harry Potter books were from the Devil and that Christians should not read them. At the time, I did not pay much attention to the debate because I was not particularly interested in those books anyway. Easy to avoid the controversy when you didn’t care one way or another. As I grew older, however, I became much more of a reader. I now try to read every day and enjoy a wide variety of genres. Since I graduated from seminary, I have significantly increased my fiction reading and have worked through the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs (John Carter), J. K. Rowling (Harry Potter), and Rick Riordan (Percy Jackson).…
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Does the Bible Teach us to Wrestle with God?
In the early morning hours by the Jabbok River, Jacob wrestled with a divine being in a struggle that has intrigued theologians for centuries. An article by Desiring God suggests this encounter serves as a model for believers to wrestle with God in their own lives. But is this interpretation faithful to the text, or does it overlook deeper truths about divine encounters and transformation? I have written before about the bad habit of reading Bible stories inappropriately, but this is a good example of how not to read a Bible story. Like many well-intentioned Bible readers, the author assumes that the actions of the characters in the story are to be emulated and the events of the story should form our expectations of how God operates with us. For example, the author from the above-mentioned article notes the following: God will meet you in your anguish, fear, and uncertainty.…
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Book Review: A Reader’s Hebrew and Greek Bible, 2nd ed. (Zondervan Academic)
Because I am involved in teaching the biblical languages at the seminary level, I am regularly asked about Greek and Hebrew Reader Bibles. I have not had much experience with Reader Bibles so I asked Zondervan to let me review their 2nd edition of A Reader’s Hebrew and Greek Bible. I hope this review will be helpful both to my students as well as the academically-inclined reader of the blog. The Aesthetics, Bulk, Weight, etc. First of all, I was impressed with the texture of the hard cover and the quality of the binding. Granted I am no expert on book bindings, but it seems very solid, and lays flat immediately. It is one of the more annoying things to have a book that doesn’t lay flat, so this is much appreciated! It is 4 LBS, and contains 2272 pages. It seems comparable my Biblia Sacra which is about…