Ff Bruce Quotes

The best way to destroy an enemy is to turn him into a friend.

The mother of Jesus appears twice in this Gospel—here, and at the cross (19:25 ff.). There is also an allusion to her in 6:42. In none of these places is

When the Christian message is so thoroughly accommodated to the prevalent climate of opinion that it becomes mere expression of that opinion, it is no longer the Christian message.

The evidence for our New Testament writings is ever so much greater than the evidence for many writings of classical authors, the authenticity of which no one dreams of questioning. And if the New Testament were a collection of secular writings, their authenticity would generally be regarded as beyond all doubt.

By an act of faith the Christian reader today may identify the New Testament, as it has been received, with the entire ‘tradition of Christ’. But confidence in such an act of faith will be strengthened if the same faith proves to have been exercised by Christians in other places and at other times—if it is in line with the traditional ‘criteria of canonicity’. And there is no reason to exclude the bearing of other lines of evidence on any position that is accepted by faith. In

An answer commonly given is that through suffering Jesus was perfected in his role as savior ; 254 and though that seems right as far as it goes, one should not, I would argue, minimize the implication in the text that Jesus’ sufferings somehow made him more complete or whole. F. F. Bruce has asked: “If the Son of God is the effulgence of his Father’s glory and the very impress of his being, how can he be thought of as falling short of perfection?” 255 The answer depends upon the kind of perfection in question. If the essence of God is love, if God is now in the process of creating additional persons to love, and if God himself suffers along with his suffering children, then there is a personal sense in which not even God, despite his metaphysical perfections, is now complete or whole or “all in all.” For in no loving relationship can the one who loves be complete or whole until the one who is loved is also complete and whole; in that respect, the process whereby the children are reconciled and made whole is also a process whereby the Father is completed and made whole in his relationship with these very children.

Canonical exegesis may be defined as the interpretation of individual components of the canon in the context of the canon as a whole. Even in the pre-canonical period evidence of intra-biblical interpretation is not lacking. In the Old Testament it can be seen how later law-codes took over the provisions of earlier codes and applied them to fresh situations, or how later prophets took up and reinterpreted the oracles of their predecessors.

An individual gospel might have been designed as the gospel for a particular community, but when it was included in a collection with other writings of the same genre, the individual writings were viewed as complementary one to another, each presenting a distinctive aspect of the ministry of Jesus.

El canon cristiano, tal como fue promulgado por Marción, comprendía dos partes,—una llamada El Evangelio (una adecuada recensión del tercer Evangelio) y otra llamada El Apóstol (una recensión similar editada de las nueve cartas de Pablo a las iglesias y su carta a Filemón).

El segundo volumen se inicia con el relato de la resurrección de Jesús y va hasta los treinta años siguientes; registra el avance del Evangelio a lo largo del camino que va desde Judea vía Antioquía a Roma, y finaliza con el heraldo en jefe proclamando el Evangelio en el corazón del Imperio con la aquiescencia en pleno de las autoridades imperiales.

Una característica de Hechos, que se observará en el curso de nuestra exposición, es la serie de paralelismos establecidos entre la actividad misionera de Pedro y la de Pablo,59 aunque ninguno de las dos es el estándar de comparación por el cual el otro es evaluado.

When the danger which caused them to call upon the God of the covenant receded, the tendency was strong to slip back into conformity with the way of life of their Canaanite neighbors, to intermarry with them, to imitate their fertility rites in order to secure regular rainfall and good crops, and to think of Yahweh rather as a ba’al or fertility god than as the God who had delivered them from Egypt and made his nature and will known to them in the wilderness. The bond

was not only Canaanite cities in the land itself that tried to make them virtual slaves. From time to time they suffered raids from beyond the Jordan, by their own kinsmen of Moab and Ammon and Edom, and more disastrously by the Bedouin from more distant parts of Arabia, who, riding on camels, raided their territory year by year at harvest time and destroyed their

crops. These “Midianites” or “Ishmaelites”, as they are called in the biblical record, would have made life impossible for the Israelites; but an Israelite man named Gideon, from the tribe of Manasseh, took leadership and led a small and mobile band against the invaders, took them by surprise, pursued them across the Jordan and killed many of them. The grateful tribesmen invited Gideon to become their king and to found a hereditary monarchy, but he refused.

monarchy, if it was like the monarchies which governed Israel’s neighbors, was alien to the ideals which they had learned in the wilderness. Let Yahweh alone be acknowledged as King in Israel. Let him use as his agents not one particular family, but the men whom from time to time he might choose, giving them special powers, to rule his people and defend

One of Gideon's sons, Abimelech by name, did not share his father's views about kingship. (He, however, was the son of a Canaanite woman and had been brought up with his mother’s relatives at Shechem.) After his father’s death he attempted to succeed to his power, and killed off most of the other members of Gideon’s family in the process. For three years he reigned as king from Shechem, but his kingdom did not extend beyond Western Manasseh.

Horses, as we shall see,13 were scarcely used in Israel until the reign of Solomon.

Great Babylon” (16:19): though Babylon is not mentioned in Scripture between Genesis 11:9 (Babel is the Hebrew name for Bab-ili, which we render Babylon) and the days of Hezekiah, it had its own position in Hebrew thought. Though it had little political importance between its capture by the Kassites in 1530 BC and its being made the capital of a Chaldean empire in 626 BC, it was the virtually undisputed commercial and religious capital of the Fertile Crescent. So it is the personification, so to speak, for the Bible, of humanity organized for financial profit, and of manmade religion in all its attractive sophistry. These are the two aspects which are dealt with in chapters 17 (religion) and 18 (commerce). If we compare Nahum and Habakkuk, we shall learn something of the different impression created by the pride and cruelty of Assyria and the corruption of human nature which the prophet saw in Babylon.

Conversation with a view to timely instruction will help to build up a strong Christian character and stimulate growth in grace.

Since the days of Christ, these men we have mentioned have changed the world. Paul, Augustine, Luther, Calvin and Wesley—these have been great men who have transformed our world. F.F. Bruce was right when he said, "Beware when you read Romans. Anything can happen." All the great revivals in the Christian world have been triggered by this book.

Even in its canonical form a biblical document may be better understood if account be taken of successive stages in its composition. There

The suggestion is made from time to time that the canon of scripture might be augmented by the inclusion of other ‘inspirational’ literature, ancient or modern, from a wider cultural spectrum.947 But this betrays a failure to appreciate what the canon actually is. It is not an anthology of inspired or inspiring literature. If one were considering a collection of writings suitable for reading in church, the suggestion might be more relevant. When a sermon is read in church, the congregation is often treated to what is, in intention at least, inspirational literature; the same may be said of prayers which are read from the prayerbook or of hymns which are sung from the hymnbook. But when the limits of the canon are under consideration, the chief concern is to get as close as possible to the source of the Christian faith. By

The Christian affirmation that God is love is not sustained by ignoring the cross, in all its stark obscenity, but by setting it in the forefront of the situation.

The land of Canaan, he was told, had been divinely promised to these ancestors, and their God had not forgotten his promise; indeed, God had observed the affliction of their descendants.

Closely related to these nomadic groups was another called the Amalekites, but they were hated as bitter enemies of Israel. The hatred lasted for centuries, and it can best be explained if they were guilty of some breach of covenant.

alliance of five military governors of Canaanite citadels attempted to bar the Israelites from turning south from Gibeon and the other cities of the Hivites in the central hill country, which had submitted to them as subject allies. But the alliance was completely defeated, and the road to the south lay open to the invaders.

Israelites saw the controlling power of the patriarchs’ God, as he intervened for the deliverance of their descendants. And indeed, Moses in the ordinary way could neither have foreseen nor controlled these phenomena. The fact that they occurred just at that time confirmed God's instructions given to him in his vision and made possible Israel’s escape from Egypt in the way in which Moses assured them it would happen.

therefore, men and women who were holy to him, reserved for him, must reproduce these qualities in their own life and conduct.

This attitude we may call practical monotheism. Whether other gods—the defeated gods of Egypt or the gods of the Canaanites or of other nations—might have some sort of existence was not a question about which either Moses or his followers were likely to trouble themselves.

Jews constitute but one quarter of one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. . . . (But they are) as prominent on the planet as any other people, and their importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of their

Certainly I am confident that he would not share the very skeptical approach to Old Testament history of several recent writers. He did not believe that biblical authors, simply because they had theological purposes, were unreliable as historians.

But what is given in the following pages may, I hope, serve in some sort of prolegomena to the volumes in the Paternoster Church History series.

he would have to have been invented to account for the rise and progress of the nation of Israel. The

This is another way of stating the principle that `the labourer deserves his wages' (Lk. 10:7; 1 Tim. 5:18; cf. Mt. 10:10)

This is another way of stating the principle that `the labourer deserves his wages' (Lk. 10:7; 1 Tim. 5:18; cf. Mt. 10:10) or, as Paul elsewhere paraphrases those words of Jesus, `those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel' (1 Cor. 9:14).

This is a common prudential maxim, applying a law of nature to human conduct (cf. Mt. 7:16-20//Lk. 6:43; Lk. 19:21; 1 Cor. 9:11; 2 Cor. 9:6, the last passage referring to the quantity, not the quality, of seed and crop).

It was only those whose faith and allegiance were beyond question that he admitted into the inner secret of his person and purpose.

Some interpreters see a symbolic significance in “the third day.” Jesus’ manifesting his glory (verse 11) on the third day has been held to foreshadow his resurrection. It is very doubtful if the Evangelist had any such thought in his mind.

The kind of action she wanted him to perform, for the limited purpose she had in mind, was not in keeping with his messianic vocation; perhaps it smacked too much of the turning of stones into loaves of bread (one of the Synoptic temptations).

The water, provided for purification as laid down by Jewish law and custom, stands for the whole ancient order of Jewish ceremonial, which Christ was to replace by something better. The servants, mindful

The filling of the jars to the brim indicates that the appointed time for the ceremonial observances of the Jewish law had run its full course; these observances had so completely fulfilled their purpose that nothing of the old order remained to be accomplished. The time had come therefore for the new order to be inaugurated. The wine symbolizes the new order as the water in the jars symbolized the old order. The “chief steward

But if it is a miracle of the old creation, it is a parable of the new creation. Christ has come into the world to fulfill and terminate the old order, and to replace it by a new worship “in spirit and truth” which surpasses the old as much as wine surpasses water.

We looked on his glory,” said the Evangelist of the incarnate Word in his prologue. Now he has narrated the first of a sequence of “signs

The money-changers also performed a convenient service for visitors to the temple, who might bring all sorts of coinage with them and require to have it exchanged for something more acceptable.

What Jesus did is best classified as an act of prophetic symbolism. If he had Zechariah 14:21 in his mind when he protested against his Father’s house (cf. Luke 2:49) being turned into a supermarket, we may recall that the preceding verses of Zechariah 14 tell how all nations will go up to Jerusalem to worship.

The Jews” here are members of the establishment, especially the temple authorities, as in Mark 11:25 f. Their request for a “sign” was misguided. What sign could have been more eloquent than that which they had just witnessed?

The Evangelist explains that the words of Jesus referred to his body,

question of the chronological relation of John’s account of the temple cleansing to the Synoptic version which dates it during Holy Week is not easy to answer; an adequate answer, indeed, would require a separate excursus.150 It seems probable that John takes it out of its chronological sequence and places it, with programmatic intent, in the forefront of his record of Jesus’ Jerusalem ministry. If his readers understand the significance of this incident, they will know what the ministry was all about.

There are two levels of believing in Jesus’ name—that spoken of in John 1:12, which carries with it the authority to become God’s children, and that spoken of here.

Many of Paul’s friends would have assured him that the tendency to misuse the freedom of the Spirit as an excuse for enthusiastic licence could be checked only by a stiff dose of law. But Paul could not agree: the principle of law was so completely opposed to spiritual freedom that it could never be enlisted in defence of that freedom: nothing was more certainly calculated to kill true freedom. The freedom of the Spirit was the antidote alike to legal bondage and unrestrained licence.