Word: blomberg
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Take the Sermon on the Mount," says Craig Blomberg, a Baptist clergyman who considers himself a conservative Evangelical. "We know it's not a straight, stenographic account. When you look up those passages in Matthew, they can be read in a matter of minutes. Whereas a teacher who spoke to a large crowd like that might have held forth much...
Most combatants in the historical Jesus wars assume that at least one major American religious group is sitting them out. Traditionally, the Evangelical position on the New Testament was: It happened, and that's that. But the anthology Jesus Under Fire, for which Blomberg wrote a chapter, represents academic Evangelicalism's commitment to greater theological engagement and subtlety. He sketches out a position that, at least by its wording, may be easier for many Americans to accept than the statements by some of the topic's higher-profile jousters...
...Christian view," he says, "has always been one that God's spirit was involved and created a degree of accuracy that would not have been there otherwise." Blomberg explains biblical inerrancy, long a defining tenet of conservative American religion, as follows: "When the texts are interpreted in accordance with their historical and literary context, what they say is true." That allows him to concede that the Sermon on the Mount might have gone on longer than the Gospels suggest, and also to credit the differences among Matthew, Mark, Luke and John to "omissions and paraphrases" that were a natural part...
...Blomberg says he is delighted that many "grass-roots" Christians are willing to take the Gospels' picture of Jesus totally on faith, but points out, "The problem is that other world views and religions make the same claims as we do. To defend your view in the marketplace of religious ideas, you have to be able to give reasons for why you believe the Bible's claims about itself...
...this context that Blomberg, given his position on the religious/political spectrum, makes a remarkably friendly assessment of the Jesus Seminar. "People like Crossan," he ventures, "see themselves, though we might disagree, as holding out one way of salvaging something of Christianity lest the whole thing deteriorate into pure unbelief...