The Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) is the professional guild for scholars of the Bible. The Society includes members from all over the theological, philosophical, and educational spectrums. SBL publishes two main periodicals: The Journal of Biblical Literature (JBL) and Review of Biblical Literature (RBL). RBL has recently reached the milestone of having published its 5,000th book review. In connection with this achievement, RBL is making its free access to book reviews even easier. RBL now has its own blog, where the reviews published each month will be listed for easy reference: http://rblnewsletter.blogspot.com/. Each book reviewed will be listed in a separate blog entry. The great thing about the blog…

In 2007, John Piper wrote a book critiquing N. T. Wright’s views on Paul’s doctrine of justification. The title of that book is The Future of Justification (which you can download for free here). In 2009, N. T. Wright will have published his response (which I noted here and here). Today, Trevin Wax has an interview with N. T. Wright about his response to Piper (HT: Mike Bird). It’s an interesting interview, but it looks like Wright hasn’t responded too well to Piper’s work. Wright has several critiques of Piper’s views on justification that are quite simply incorrect. For example, here’s how the interview ends:

Last week I posted a notice about Tom Wright’s forthcoming response to John Piper on the issue of justification. The work is titled Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision. The book will be available in Great Britain from SPCK on February 1, and in the United States from Intervarsity in June. Intervarsity has already posted a webpage about the book and has included a list of interesting endorsements. I find three things that are striking about this list.

Bart Ehrman recently debated Peter Williams on the reliability of the New Testament manuscripts (HT: Justin Taylor). The discussion took place on a British radio program called “Unbelievable.” You can sign-up for the podcast, download the mp3 here, or listen to it below. [audio:http://media.premier.org.uk/unbelievable/f884634c-cd93-4002-a5fb-589cab03a90a.mp3] Ehrman’s book Misquoting Jesus is essentially the starting point for the discussion. The book narrates Ehrman’s own spiritual journey in which he went from being an evangelical Christian to an agnostic. Ehrman’s faith collapsed when his belief in inerrancy collapsed. In the book, Ehrman seeks to explain why a knowledge of the textual basis of the NT undermines inerrancy. I reviewed Ehrman’s book a couple of…

I’ve been working on a book review of Seyoon Kim’s Christ and Caesar: The Gospel and the Roman Empire in the Writings of Paul and Luke. In this book, Kim is arguing against the likes of N. T. Wright who contend that Paul includes coded political messages in his letters in order to subvert the Roman Empire. In reading through Kim’s work, I am struck by how similar his critiques are to the ones that I made in a recent article for JETS. We raise some of the same methodological questions, but our work is entirely independent of one another. As I was reading last night, I found one paragraph…

Michael Bird has a preview of N. T. Wright’s response to John Piper on the topic of justification. Wright’s book is titled Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision, and it will be available early next year. Here’s Bird’s description: “This book is a response to many of Wright’s North American critics and to John Piper’s The Future of Justification in particular. It is not a point for point reply to Piper but a general articulation of what Wright really thinks about justification with some hand-to-hand combat with Piper (as well as others such as Carson and Seifrid) along the way. Wright gives a very forthright defence of his position, but…

(HT: David Mathis)