Burnett opens Ephesians 1 and finds Paul piling blessing on blessing: chosen before the foundation of the world, predestined in love, sealed for an inheritance. The piece sits with the dizzying generosity of Paul's grammar and asks what it means that our calling is grounded that deep.
The Pentateuch ends with Moses dying outside the promised land. Dearman reads that anticlimax theologically, finding in it a pattern: ministry passes from one hand to another, the work continues without us, and the inheritance belongs to those who come next, all by God's design.
Billings preaches the biblical pattern of barren wombs becoming the very means by which God brings forth promise, from Sarah through Hannah to Elizabeth. A talk about waiting, hope, and the kind of fruitfulness that resists every category we try to put around it.
Dearman reads the Assyrian and Babylonian exiles as the Old Testament's primary picture of corporate failure, and as the matrix N.T. Wright says shaped Jesus' announcement of the kingdom. The PCUSA's own systemic failures put us in conversation with that text from the inside.
Proverbs uses contrast to teach: life or death, wisdom or folly, no comfortable middle. Hering brings the Proverbs' grammar of formation to bear on the painful experience of catechized children who walk away anyway, and finds the tradition has more to say than parents often imagine.
The Bible doesn't supply a roadmap for Mideast policy, but it does offer a framework. Wisdom draws principles from the biblical story: God owns the land, the powerful tend to dominate the powerless, the people of God must act justly toward outsiders, and no political order can be trusted absolutely.
Evangelical support for Israel is often dismissed as purely theological, a matter of obscure end-times prophecies. Wisdom argues there's plenty of evidence that doesn't require special revelation: a small minority people surviving repeated attempts at extermination is unique enough to read on the surface.
Anyone trying to understand the Middle East has to reckon with the fact that the events of the Bible took place there. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all claim spiritual descent from the same patch of ground. Wisdom unfolds what that overlapping inheritance has produced, and how Christians might think about it.
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