New Testament

Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Church: The Zondervan Debates
christianity

Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Church: The Zondervan Debates

01/21/2026 Bruce Strom 3

For better or worse, most of us choose our intimate partners, and build our world around that choice. If a homosexual couple is accepted by the clergy of your church, what good can come from telling them they are going to burn in hell if they do not repent? We are only responsible for our own personal salvation, it is not our job, particularly if we are laymen, to speculate on whether our neighbor will be saved. That is between them and Jesus, and nobody else.
My goal is not to change your mind about homosexuality. My goal is: If you do not accept that it is possible to be both a Christian and homosexual, that you will refrain from telling them they are damned to burn in hell, but would instead refer them to an Episcopalian Church, or other church where they would be welcome.
Jesus will judge us all in front of the great IMAX theater in the sky, where we will need to account for the decisions we made in our lives as they are displayed on that screen forty feet wide and forty feet tall. Jesus is the judge; we should not seek to do his job. Instead, we work out our own salvation, judging our own actions rather than our neighbors’. […]

Anders Nygren, On Christian Agape-Love and Eros-Love in Gospels and Pauline Epistles
Biblical Interpretation

Anders Nygren, On Christian Agape-Love and Eros-Love in Gospels and Pauline Epistles

03/20/2024 Bruce Strom 5

Anders Nygren emphasizes that “Old Testament piety with its devotion to the Law was by no means the external legalism it is often assumed to have been. There was an inward bond that held the godly man to the Law. The righteous felt no sense of external compulsion when confronted by the Law, but a sense of inner solidarity with it. Its observance gave him value and made him acceptable to God. His prevailing mood was expressed in Psalm 1,” the Psalm that sings of Law as Gospel. […]

Book Reviews and Miscellaneous

On Learning Attic and Koine Greek, Classical Latin, and Biblical Hebrew

03/02/2022 Bruce Strom 0

You would only want to learn these ancient languages if you are truly a serious student, and want to read the Scriptures and classics in their original language, and so you will not miss the word plays and puns that you can only catch in the original language. When reading epic poems of Homer and the Greek playwrights, or the Psalms in Old Testament, or the elegant works of Cicero, you can experience the rhymes and rhythms of the original language, as poetry can be incredibly difficult to translate. When we cut the video for a play by Aeschylus on the Battle of Salamis in the Persian Wars, the various translations we encountered were RADICALLY different. Personally, I am tempted not to read any more Greek plays until I learn how to read Attic Greek. […]

Five Miniute Theology

Should the Books of the Apocrypha Be Included In the Bible?

02/09/2022 Bruce Strom 1

The Church Fathers differed on what should be included in the Old Testament canon, St Jerome, who had updated the Latin translation of Scriptures in the Vulgate, preferred a narrow canon including only the Hebrew books of the Jewish canon. St Augustine preferred the wider canon which included the deutero-canonical books written in Greek, which are called the Apocrypha by Protestants. St Jerome and St Augustine were contemporaries, they often corresponded with each other. […]