Sam Scriber

The Theology of the Gospel of John is a scholarly work by D. Moody Smith. Smith is a highly degreed academic and is more than qualified to present this primer for those who wish to delve deeply into the study of the fourth gospel. Currently serving on the faculty of Duke University’s Divinity School, Smith’s scholarship has been highly influential in the world of New Testament studies. The book itself is a very helpful and relatively accessible work which explores the multi-faceted influences which surrounded the composition of the Gospel of John. Smith’s major assertion is that the Gospel was composed during a time, the late first century, when the Jewish sect which would come to be known as Christianity was being shunned for their assertion that Jesus was indeed the fulfillment of the Old Testament Messianic prophecies. He shows how this schism caused the Johannine community to become sectarian and sharply define itself against Judaism, which would cause their theology to become v...

To begin to understand the Christology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christology must be defined and Dietrich Bonhoeffer must be known. In his book The Christology of the New Testament, Oscar Cullman notes that biblical inquiries about Christology, “…do not simply place Jesus in a general human category, but attempt rather to explain his uniqueness.” It is not simply a pragmatic defining of the different roles Jesus functioned within, i.e. prophet, healer, Rabbi. Those are but miniscule pieces of a very large answer. Both the Christologies of Jesus and of Dietrich Bonhoeffer deal with what makes the Christ unique, transcendent, and the unifying force of being. What does Christ mean to existence? The man who asked this question most courageously in the twentieth century, did so not only with his pen, but also with his life.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a brilliant German theologian who earned his doctorates degree at the age of 21. After a vibrant yet short career of shaking the foundatio...

Among the writings of the New Testament, the Johannine examples are filled with portents of humanity’s final destination more than the others. The study of these prophecies (along with the rest of the Biblical prophetic writings) is commonly called eschatology, which basically just means the study of the last. This field in American Christianity usually finds its foundation in the Book of Revelation and there is no shortage of contradictory and divergent views on exactly what the fulfillment of these writings will look like. For a modern evangelical Christian, it is very valuable to undertake a scholarly study of Biblical eschatology and escape from the endless myriad of doomsayers that plague the mass culture. Eschatology deals with ultimate reality; this is why it holds such a grip on the imaginations of so many. Most people desire to know their future and the future of their loved ones, biblical prophecy seems to hold the best chance to gain that knowledge. As a result, the field ...

The God of the Gospel of John by Marianne Meye Thompson is a book which seeks to fill a void in New Testament scholarship. The void is God. According to the introduction, Thompson wrote this work in response to a then twenty-five year old essay by Nils A. Dahl of the Yale Divinity School called “The Neglected Factor in New Testament Theology”. Dahl reportedly asserted, along with others after him, that scholars had been primarily focused on Christology and had all but ignored theology. Thompson asserts that the new Testament is actually a book about God, expressing himself through Christ. She does this by exploring and analyzing the fourth gospel, successfully unpacking and applying some very interesting facts about the way the Greek world of the early church interacted with the divine, and how that interaction played into the development of early Christian theology. This critique will succinctly summarize the entire book, discuss the support Thompson uses to demonstrate her poi...

Below is the script I wrote for a Catholic apologetics video geared toward lay people. The video is also linked below with all of the sources I used for this script in it's description. If you grew up going to church and you’re like me, then you may have wondered about the guy at the podium every Sunday morning. He always gave a sermon, sometimes compelling, sometimes inspiring, maybe a little bit of a snoozer every now and then, but he was up there doing his best to explain to his congregation exactly what it is we should believe. But why was he in that position? On whose authority did your pastor preach the Truth about the most important matters a human being can encounter? What if he was just up there giving us his best shot? What if he was wrong? Does it matter? If you believe in Jesus, if you consider yourself a Christian, then the subjects taught at Church are very important. We’re talking about who God is, what he expects of us, and how we get to heaven. Doesn’t ge...