Bart Bruehler

Biography

Bart B. Bruehler teaches Bible and Religion courses in the College of Adult and Professional Studies at Indiana Wesleyan University. He holds his Ph.D. in New Testament from Emory University and is ordained in the Free Methodist Church. Studying and teaching scripture is his main vocation and passion, and he also enjoys playing trombone and cooking from scratch. He is married to Anne, who teaches TESOL at IWU, and they have two sons and a daughter.

I came to know the love of God and the grace of Jesus in a transformative way as a teenager. Soon after, the Holy Spirit urged me to take leadership of a Bible Study in my high school. Being a new believer, I dove into studying Scripture so that I could responsibly teach others. That calling has stayed with me now for decades – being a committed student of the Bible so that I can teach others well. Over the years, God also called me into ministries with people facing homelessness, international refugees, and persons with disabilities. I seek to bring the best, scholarly study of Scripture to engage with God’s heart to save and sanctify people and all creation. I am to Anne, and we have three children from teenager to young adult. I play trombone and enjoy loving others by making them tasty food, especially fresh-baked bread.

Titles of recent publications:

1. “Configurations of Repentance in Luke-Acts” published in Horizons in Biblical Theology. This article looks at how Luke blends prophetic, priestly, wisdom, and apocalyptic elements to create a flexible, recognizable, and persuasive conception of repentance.
2. “The Influence of Progymnastic Refutation in the Gospel of Luke” published in Biblical: The Journal of the Pontifical Biblical Institute of Rome. This article summarizes the teaching of “refutation” as a skill in the ancient preliminary rhetorical handbooks (The Progymnasmata) to show that Jesus often counters arguments about the inappropriateness of his actions with refutation that either turn his opponents’ arguments back on them or show how they are inconsistent.
3. “Jesus the Archetypal Martyr in Revelation” soon to be published in the online magazine Firebrand. This piece (co-written with Dr. Rachel Coleman) explores how Revelation emphasizes Jesus’s death as a martyr as central to his role as the Lamb of God throughout the book and in how we follow the way of the Lamb.

I gave a presentation with Dr. Frank Poncé on the assessment of general education outcomes at the Assessment Institute in Indianapolis in the Spring of 2023.
I continue to be fascinated by the interaction and intersection of our minds, bodies, senses, thinking, and emotions as evoked by the persuasive stories of Scripture. This interdisciplinary approach is at the heart of a commentary that I am writing on the Gospel of Luke for the Rhetoric of Religious Antiquity

Interests

• Space and Place in the New Testament
• Theology of Luke-Acts
• Socio-Rhetorical Interpretation
• Theology of Disability
• Monotheism in the Letter of James

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Degrees

• Ph.D.
  2007, Emory University
• M.Div.
  1998, Asbury College
• B.A.
  1995, Asbury College