I’m Chris. This site is a chapter-by-chapter Bible commentary written in the lane between traditional American evangelicalism and progressive theology, an underserved space where a lot of serious readers feel homeless.
The conviction behind it
There’s a lot of online commentary out there. Most of it lives in one of two camps. The traditional camp tends to read the text as if it were written to modern Western Christians, building careful proof-text systems out of context. The progressive camp sometimes loses something essential while trying to recover lost voices.
Neither tends to read the Bible the way Marty Solomon, N.T. Wright, John Walton, Tim Mackie, Ray Vander Laan, or Scot McKnight have been teaching us to read it: as a story, situated in a world, told by people whose imagination was shaped by an ancient Near East and a Second-Temple Judaism we are still slowly recovering.
This site is for readers in that lane. People who don’t want to flatten the text but also don’t want to lose it. People who suspect the Bible is more interesting than they were told, and who are willing to do the slow work of reading it again.
Is this new theology?
It is not. The readings on this site (cosmic temple, divine council, image of God as vocation, the patriarchs as honest about flawed image-bearers) have roots in Jewish tradition, the early church fathers, the medieval mystics, the Eastern Orthodox stream, and the broader Christian reading tradition long before they were rediscovered by modern scholarship. If a reading here feels unfamiliar, it is most often because it has been kept alive in streams of the church the modern American evangelical tradition does not always travel through, not because it is the latest theological fashion.
For the longer lineage behind the readings on this site, see How We Read.
How to use this site
- Pick a starting point. The Hebrew Bible’s natural front door is Genesis 1; the gospels’ is Matthew 1. Philippians 2 is the site’s first epistle and a single chapter that condenses the gospel’s deepest pattern (the kenosis hymn). Start with whichever calls you and keep reading from there.
- Frameworks are reusable theological lenses (cosmic temple, image of God, divine council, garden as sanctuary, chiastic structure, abundance vs. scarcity, the vocabulary of humanity, kingdom of heaven, the new Moses, fulfillment formulas, cruciform hermeneutic, gospel allegiance, exodus pattern, exile and return, two ways, counter-imperial reading). Each chapter links to the ones at play.
- Word studies sit inline wherever Hebrew or Greek unlocks something English can’t.
- Reflection prompts at the end of each chapter are for personal study or small-group discussion.
- The Books page lets you browse by book and chapter.
Influences
The voice on this site synthesizes the work of Marty Solomon, N.T. Wright, Scot McKnight, Tim Mackie, John Walton, Michael Heiser, Ray Vander Laan, Brian Zahnd, Walter Brueggemann, John Mark Comer, Mike Erre, Matthew Bates, Michael F. Bird, Nijay Gupta, and James D.G. Dunn.
Where a specific idea originates clearly with one of them, I name them. Otherwise, I write in my own voice, shaped by all of them. The frameworks pages also acknowledge the longer historical witnesses (Irenaeus, Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, Ephrem the Syrian, John Chrysostom, Maximus the Confessor, Karl Barth, and others). Again, see How We Read for the full lineage.
Translation
Most chapters use the World English Bible (WEB), a public-domain modern translation, as their default. Specific verses are quoted from the NRSVue, CSB, NASB, NIV, ESV, NLT, NET, or N.T. Wright’s Kingdom New Testament (for the New Testament) where their rendering serves the commentary better, where a word study benefits from a different reading, or where a side-by-side comparison teaches something about how translation choices shape interpretation.
Each verse block on the site indicates its source translation in the caption. Full attribution and the site’s translation policy live on the Translation Acknowledgements page.
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