Meet Dru Johnson
Dru Johnson is an associate professor of biblical and theological studies at The King’s College in New York City, director of the Center for Hebraic Thought, editor of the Routledge IPBC monograph series, host of The Biblical Mind podcast, and co-host of the OnScript Podcast. He has held research fellowships at the Shalem Institute for Advanced Studies (Jerusalem), the Logos Institute at the University of St Andrews (Scotland), and the Henry Center at TEDS (Deerfield, IL). Before all of this, he was a high-school dropout, skinhead, punk rock drummer, combat veteran, IT supervisor, and pastor—all things that he hopes none of his children ever become.
Lecture Topic
Will We Ever Again Bother with Scripture? Practicing Bible Literacy and Fluency in a Neo-Ritualized Christianity
While there has been a small tidal shift toward rituals and liturgies in the American evangelical world, there has been a simultaneous decline in Bible literacy—and Bible literacy isn’t even the goal. Bible fluency gives us a model for the ability to know Scripture and how it works (literacy) and to speak Scripture’s thinking into circumstances never imagined by the biblical authors in its grammar and with its vocabulary (fluency). Why has Bible literacy been largely neglected in the liturgical resurgence and how would inner-biblical thinking about liturgical formation critique the recent liturgy movements? Daily Bible rituals (e.g., daily quiet times and devotionals) have become distortive for a new generation unfamiliar with the deep structures of thinking across Scripture. I suggest that long-form Bible engagements coupled with intensive literary encounters with Scripture might be the best rituals for grounding and trueing the formative value of the emerging neo-ritualized Christianity.
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