John Mark Hicks

I was invited to visit the Highland Oaks Church of Christ in Dallas, Texas, but due to COVID I could not. I was diagnosed the day I was supposed to get on the plane to fly to Dallas. Consequently, I addressed the church through Zoom on the topic while experiencing some of the effects of […]

[Note: I am attempting to keep these SBD installments under 2000 words each, but that is–of course–quite inadequate for the topics covered. Consequently, these contributions are more programmatic than they are explanatory or defenses of the positions stated. You may access the whole series at my Serial page.] God called Israel to guide the nations […]

While in Montgomery Alabama for a summer meeting in 1902, James A. Harding answered several questions from the “Question Box” which was available to hearers there.  He answered a few of these through the pages of The Way (“Questions and Answers,” 4 [July 17, 1902] 121-123). One concerned the name “Christian Church” (which he opposed […]

Imbibing the theodrama by reading Scripture is critical to the development of our theological sensitivities. One of the more important dimensions of this maturing understanding of the theodrama is the concept of redemptive-historical movement within the drama itself. The theodrama is progressive; it is telos-oriented or goal-oriented. Watching the movement of the drama toward the […]

Assuming the existence of a metanarrative story embedded within the unfolding story of God with his people in Scripture (I will not take the time to defend that assumption at this point), it seems to me that we might identify the function of Scripture within the story itself in three ways. Three Functions 1. Scripture […]

Scripture comes to us as human literature. It is written by humans for humans in human language. Whatever it communicates, then, it communicates through the medium of finite, limiting, bounded human language. In this context, I raise only three points in this post. Much more, of course, could be said, but these points are significant […]

I begin this series on Stone-Campbell hermeneutics with Alexander Campbell (1788-1866).  While I recognize that Barton W. Stone (1772-1844) and Thomas Campbell (1763-1855) also had a significant impact on how the Stone-Campbell Movement read the Bible, there seems little question that Alexander Campbell was the more dominant figure for Stone-Campbell hermeneutics. Consequently, I will stress Alexander […]