What in the Word

Avondale Seminary’s new magazine column to help you read the Bible better

A new column written by Avondale Seminary staff and published in a popular church news and lifestyle magazine will help you better understand your Bible.

The column is called “What in the Word.” It’s a word-based study of biblical concepts and themes that will appear in Adventist Record each month.

Editor Jarrod Stackelroth invited Avondale Seminary to write the column as a way of increasing your biblical literacy. “The authors focus on a Hebrew or Greek word to reveal more than the obvious meaning in our vernacular,” he says. “They might explain any nuance or elaborate on how the original readers would have interpreted the word. And they’ll give us the context of the ways the word is used through Scripture.”

The “responsibility” of Avondale Seminary to “teach and build up is not confined to the hallways of an educational institution but extends to the wider church,” says head Dr Wendy Jackson. “Adventist Record provides us with a platform to do this.” She gratefully accepted Jarrod’s invitation because it will “help us enrich the biblical understanding of people we wouldn’t usually meet in our regular schedules and preaching appointments.”

The first “What in the Word” column examines the word “hope.” Conjoint senior lecturer Dr David Thiele compares our use of it as a form of “resigned encouragement” with the good news of the Bible’s “hope of the gospel.”