Pisteuomen - πιστευομεν - T. Michael W. Halcomb

Michael Halcomb. Review of David A. deSilva, Honor, Patronage, Kinship & Purity: Unlocking New Testament Culture . Downers Grove, Ill: IVP, 2000. 336 pp. $30.00. David deSilva, one of the foremost scholars in ancient Judaic and Greco-Roman culture, offers, in this work, helpful tools for responsible and integral Biblical interpretation. Reading the New Testament in light of its cultural milieu, deSilva’s socio-rhetorical methodology aims to school the reader in first-century values and practices that unlock the meanings of oft trivialized and overlooked New Testament passages. The thesis of deSilva’s work is to “[recover] the ideology of the early Christians” (20)—a recovery ultimately intended to strengthen the Church of modernity. Carefully and critically, deSilva analyzes Biblical passages through all of the lenses mentioned in the book’s title: honor, patronage, kinship and purity—each of which he devotes two chapters to. Tactfully ordered, each section of New Testament interpr...

Have you ever heard someone say, “Whenever you’re angry, you should count to ten or just walk away for a while”? Of course, the line of thinking behind such advice is: “Right now you’re angry and upset, if you stay here, in this moment, things will only get worse and you are liable to hurt someone; it is in everyone’s best interest to spend some time apart.” Now, for my purposes here, I am not really interested in the scenario itself (e.g. the two persons fighting). Instead, I am interested in the point behind the scenario, namely, that sometimes, one of the best ways of protecting the people you care about is to distance yourself from them. I think about a young man or woman who, after just having a young child, cannot make ends meet to pay their bills or to feed their baby. Turning to the last resort, the father gets involved in the drug game. In the process of making a lot of money, he also finds that he has made a lot of enemies. Before too long, his family is drug into the ...