There is an inherent tension in Christianity between the indicative and the imperative what we are and what we are intended to be between the present and the future the life we are now living and the world to come If we focus only on this world or only on the world to come the Christian life is
John W. Martens
John W. Martens is an associate professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minn,where he teaches early Christianity and Judaism. He also directs the Master of Arts in Theology program at the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity. He was born in Vancouver, B.C. into a Mennonite family that had decided to confront modernity in an urban setting. His post-secondary education began at Tabor College, Hillsboro, Kansas, came to an abrupt stop, then started again at Vancouver Community College, where his interest in Judaism and Christianity in the earliest centuries emerged. He then studied at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, and McMaster University, with stops at University of Haifa and University of Tubingen. His writing often explores the intersection of Jewish, Christian and Greco-Roman culture and belief, such as in "let the little children come to me: Children and Childhood in Early Christianity" (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), but he is not beyond jumping into the intersection of modernity and ancient religion, as in "The End of the World: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Film and Television" (Winnipeg: J. Gordon Shillingford Press, 2003). He blogs at www.biblejunkies.com and at www.americamagazine.org for "The Good Word." You can follow him on Twitter @biblejunkies, where he would be excited to welcome you to his random and obscure interests, which range from the Vancouver Canucks and Minnesota Timberwolves, to his dog, and 70s punk, pop and rock. When he can, he brings students to Greece, Turkey and Rome to explore the artifacts and landscape of the ancient world. He lives in St. Paul with his wife and has two sons. He is certain that the world will not end until the Vancouver Canucks have won the Stanley Cup, as evidence has emerged from the Revelation of John, 1 Enoch, 2 Baruch, and 4 Ezra which all point in this direction.
Posted inThe Word
Family in Flight
Family life in antiquity was a life of insecurity though families in many parts of the world still know this insecurity well even today The warm pictures we might concoct of ancient families mdash though certainly the ancients loved their children and spouses loved each other just as families do
Posted inThe Word
Becoming Clean
As a child I saw the world in peculiar ways as children tend to do influenced partly by the two powerful forces of television and the Bible Growing up in the 1960s I was fairly certain from the movies and TV shows I watched that a good portion of humanity died in quicksand so I was on guard fo
Posted inThe Word
Rich Man, Poor Man
Paul rsquo s First Letter to Timothy though many scholars doubt Paul wrote it reflects the heart of the Christian hope that Paul expressed in his letters ldquo Fight the good fight of the faith take hold of the eternal life to which you were called and for which you made the good confession in
Posted inThe Word
Love at First Sight
The baby Jesus still grabs our attention and the sweet obsession of the gypsy Yerko in Robertson Davies rsquo s The Rebel Angels for the ldquo Bebby Jesus rdquo reveals that deep attraction After a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York where Yerko sees a medieval cr che scene he
Posted inThe Word
Wastin’ Time?
There is a bittersweet gentleness to Otis Redding rsquo s classic song ldquo Sitting on the Dock of the Bay rdquo as the singer looks homeward to Georgia while ldquo wastin rsquo time rdquo on the San Francisco docks Everyone has experienced a longing for home whether at summer camp as a chi
Posted inThe Word
The Coming of the King
The Greek word that refers to Jesus rsquo arrival most often translated as ldquo second coming rdquo is parousia The term was adopted by Christians from the common Greek usage and imperial Roman ideology of the day in which a city prepared for and eagerly anticipated the arrival of a major po
Posted inThe Word
The Small Matter of Sin
The passage from the Book of Wisdom about God ldquo overlooking rdquo sins has a wry humor when juxtaposed with little Zacchaeus too small in stature to be seen That is not true of course for no matter where Zacchaeus was standing hidden among the crowd or walking away from Jesus God ldquo
Posted inThe Good Word
Two New Books
Part of what has been keeping me off the blogosphere has been a collection of issues such as illness two bad colds in quick succession the SBL Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meetings and Thanksgiving This is enough to grind writing for a blog to a standstill but there is still another
Posted inThe Good Word
The Second Letter of Paul to the Thessalonians Online Commentary (8)
This is the eighth and final entry in the Second Letter of Paul to the Thessalonians Bible Junkies Commentary You can find the first entry here nbsp In the first entryI discussed introductory matters such as the origin of the Church in Thessalonica its early history with Paul Silvanus and Timo