Brian Chilcote
An Invitation to Uncertainty
"Trust is the bedrock of social life at all levels, from romance and parenting to national government. Deception always undermines it....
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Affirming Church West Chester
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Loving God and Loving Others Fearlessly
Brian Chilcote
- Aug 3
- 7 min
Homosexuality and the Bible, Part One
Data over Dogma is a popular podcast that features Bible scholar Dan McClellan and Atheist Dan Beecher interacting with biblical material...
Brian Chilcote
- Jun 30
- 13 min
Bible Things That Make You Go, "Huh?"
"What is it?" Whether it's Superman, a UFO or a strange sea creature, inquiring humans want to know. We make our best guesses: A bird? A...
Brian Chilcote
- Apr 13
- 11 min
Genocidal Joshua?
What about the bothersome parts of the Bible that depict God telling people to kill other people? How did these scenes make it into our...
Brian Chilcote
- Mar 21
- 9 min
Can I get Your Autograph?
Thoughts on the Authorship of Scripture We cannot be dependent on the “original autographs,” not only because we do not have them, but...
Brian Chilcote
- Mar 16
- 7 min
They Told Stories About Him
"… Jesus was the kind of extraordinary person who inspired people so profoundly that they told stories about him. As they did, they...
Brian Chilcote
- Feb 21
- 20 min
Sources of Truth: How do we know what we know?
You've seen optical illusions- they're everywhere. In times past, decorators and artists would produce paintings called trompe l'oeil...
Brian Chilcote
- Feb 16
- 22 min
Time, Text and Translation: A (very) Brief Biography of the New Testament
It's around 40 CE. Stories and sayings of Jesus are circulating around Jerusalem, other nearby urban centers and Galilee. A novel Jewish...
Brian Chilcote
- Jan 26
- 9 min
Peeking Over the Wall of Certainty
Many churchgoing believers are given the impression that the Bible is totally unique among written works. We are taught that in subject...
Brian Chilcote
- Dec 20, 2022
- 23 min
What's so Apocalyptic about the Gospel?
There's more than one way to see the Good News. Ever heard of an exophytic complex cyst adjacent to the splenic dome? Unless you're a...
Brian Chilcote
- Nov 14, 2022
- 2 min
Where to Begin? Books and Podcasts you Should Know
There once was a book called the Bible But some people labeled it libel "Why?" you may ask It was taken to task For promoting a God who's...
Brian Chilcote
- Nov 1, 2022
- 9 min
More Colors on the Hermeneutical Spectrum
Here we finish off our series on some of the different flavors of hermeneutics with a brief survey of three more major schools of...
Brian Chilcote
- Oct 27, 2022
- 7 min
Based on a True Story! Hermeneutics Part 5
Like most things involving human communication, the spectrum of hermeneutic lenses is a complex and fascinating subject. As we have seen...
Brian Chilcote
- Oct 25, 2022
- 6 min
Unwritten Rules and the Bible- Hermeneutics 4
Don't expect your meeting at a Venezuelan coffee shop to start on time. It's rude to expect anything less than 15 minutes past the...
Brian Chilcote
- Oct 20, 2022
- 6 min
Wellhausen's Big Idea
The Great Isaiah Scroll, part of the collection of documents discovered in the Dead Sea Scrolls trove is 23 feet long and contains 54...
Brian Chilcote
- Oct 14, 2022
- 7 min
Two More Hermeneutics
"On this home by Horror haunted—tell me truly, I implore— Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!” Quoth the Raven...
Brian Chilcote
- Oct 11, 2022
- 7 min
Herman Who? An Introduction to Hermeneutics
Hermeneutics is a ten-dollar word that describes how we derive meaning from texts. Rendering thoughts into language, recording and...
Brian Chilcote
- Oct 6, 2022
- 5 min
Rhetorical Questions Part 6: Implications for Interpretation
Rhetoric… So what? What are the implications for us, modern readers of the Gospel of John? And what might be of value in applying ancient...
Brian Chilcote
- Oct 6, 2022
- 5 min
Rhetorical Questions Part 5: The Gospel of John meets Cicero
It has been suggested that the gospel of John is organized similarly to a Ciceronian argument in a court of law (Cicero was a well known...
Brian Chilcote
- Oct 5, 2022
- 6 min
Rhetorical Questions Part 4 Literary Devices
While only a few privileged denizens of antiquity had access to an education in rhetoric, nearly everyone experienced it in some way as...
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