John Punshon (1954) Obituary

When William Penn, whose portrait still adorns the walls of Christ Church College, was expelled from Oxford in 1661 for his nonconformist views and alternative worship venues, who would have thought that one of Oxford\u27s alumni three centuries later would become one of the leading Quaker interpreters and ministers of the late 20\u27h and early 21 centuries? Having experienced a number of faith traditions in his earlier years,John Punshon actually joined the Friends movement while at Oxford. A lover of Newman and the aesthetic spirituality of the Oxford Movement, and having experienced the biblical vitality of his grandfather\u27s rural Baptist church during the Second World War, John came to appreciate the simplicty of Quaker worship during his Oxford years, and his life has been given to interpreting that faith in practice ever since

The Lord\u27s Prayer as a Transformative Pattern

Do you struggle with your prayer life? I do, and I think most people do as well. Jesus challenged his disciples in the garden: Could you not wait with me [in prayer] one hour? I have trouble with five minutes! If you’re like me, upon entering a time of personal prayer you might find your mind wandering or yourself thinking about the demands of the day. Things to do, concerns about loved ones, pressures of the day, a twinge of guilt about an insensitive remark or a selfish deed —these distractions interrupt my prayer time; I imagine I’m not alone. But what if these distractions are actually the most pressing items we need to lift to God in Paul Anderson on April 4, 2018 Topics: Prayer Spiritual Disciplines prayer? Perhaps our inward “distractions” are the very things we need to offer back to God as a life-based outline of a prayer agenda

Moving the Conversation Forward: Open Questions and New Directions (Chapter in Communities in Dispute : Current Scholarship on the Johannine Epistles)

Given that R. Alan Culpepper has fittingly summarized the essays in the introduction to the present collection, such an overview will not be necessary in this concluding essay. Rather, my charge is to comment on how the above essays move critical conversations forward as well as noting new directions and open questions regarding state-of-the-art understandings of the Johannine Epistles. As such, this essay will progress through the developments achieved in the three parts of this collection, but then return in reverse order, from the third part to the first, considering the open questions and new directions that emerge

A God Who Laughs... And Weeps

Excerpt: Do you think God laughs? Do you think God weeps? These are hard questions to answer with any certainty. But if Jesus indeed reveals to us what God is like, both of these questions may be answered with a yes:\u2

Primitive Christianity Revived—The Original Quaker Vision

Quaker histories over the last century or so have been highly interpretive in their interests and approaches, yielding a number of diverse results as to the character of the early Quaker movement, with varying implications. Obviously, one of the interests in history involves seeking to understand more about the past in order to shed light on the present and the future of the Friends movement itself. What, however, if such an interest is itself misguided? What if the founders of the Friends movement did not seek to start a movement, but rather, were solely invested in something entirely different? In their own terms, the first two generations of Friends were seeking to recover “Basic Christianity” or “Primitive Christianity Revived,” seeking to be “Friends of Jesus” because they claimed to know and carry out his will, as referenced in John 15:14-15

On Biblical Forgeries and Imagined Communities—A Critical Analysis of Recent Criticism

Several weeks ago, I was contacted by several biblical scholars, asking what I thought of the article by Hugo Méndez in the Journal of New Testament Studies, as well as its treatment in the Daily Beast by the leading religion commentator, Candida Moss. I like and respect Professors Moss and Méndez, so I was of course interested in the issues they were engaging. I also had lunch with Bart Ehrman in Marburg last August, at the international Society of New Testament Studies meetings, so I was curious to see what Hugo might have done with Bart’s work on early Christian pseudepigraphal (falseauthorship) writings. As Johannine scholarship has been a lifelong pursuit for me, keeping up on the latest is always of interest. I then received an invitation by Mark Elliott, editor of Bible and Interpretation, to write a response. I said I was tempted but was facing a few other deadlines. When he later shared that he was hoping I might yield to that temptation, I agreed to write a response, so here it is

On Seeking the Truth (and being found by it) -- A Christocentric Double Search (Chapter 11 of Befriending Truth: Quaker Perspectives)

The Religious Society of Friends emerged in great synergy with the Seekers of Northwest England three-and-a-half centuries ago, and they still have a great deal to offer the seekers of the 21st Century. In a day and age where more and more young people are registering as none when it comes to their religious affiliation, there nonetheless abides a deep hunger for spiritual reality, which some religious institutions fail to deliver. Because a Quaker spirituality of education envisions the classroom as a meeting for worship in which learning is welcome, the quest for truth is a part of all disciplines, with student and teacher alike seeking to be led into liberating truth by the Present Teacher, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life On. 14:6). In that sense, it is not only the student and instructor who seek the truth, but each one is also being sought by the Master-as Rufus Jones described it: A Double Search. Seeking the truth and being found by it was the calling of early Friends, and it continues to be the vocation of contemporary Friends whatever tradition they embrace and whatever the context in which they serve

Bakhtin\u27s Dialogism and the Corrective Rhetoric of the Johannine Misunderstanding Dialogue: Exposing Seven Crises in the Johannine Situation (Chapter

One of the most fascinating thinkers and literary theorists within the last century is the late Russian form critic Mikhail Bakhtin, whose theory of dialogism seeks to account for several levels of dialectical tension and interplay in great literature. On one level, Bakhtin observes the “heteroglossic” character of language. Between its centrifugal uses in popularistic culture and the centripetal actions of philologists and grammarians attempting to standardize meanings and associations, living language is always in a state of flux. On another level, Bakhtin suggests that discourse is always “polyphonic.” Because meanings reverberate against each other upon their utterance, transmission, and reception, the making of meaning is itself a dialogical reality. On a third level, when ironic misunderstanding is used in novelistic prose, Bakhtin asserts this feature is always rhetorical