{"id":510,"date":"2026-05-31T05:52:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-31T05:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/inside.luthersem.edu\/news\/?p=510"},"modified":"2026-05-31T21:08:17","modified_gmt":"2026-05-31T21:08:17","slug":"luther-seminary-student-receives-old-testament-prize","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inside.luthersem.edu\/news\/2026\/05\/31\/luther-seminary-student-receives-old-testament-prize\/","title":{"rendered":"Luther Seminary Student Receives Old Testament Prize"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Recent Luther Seminary graduate Ian Krueger received at commencement this year the John Milton Prize in Old Testament<\/a><\/strong>. Ian graduated with an M.A. in Bible<\/a><\/strong> and was recognized for his paper \u201dMetaphor, Absence, Poetics: An Exegesis from the First Three Verses of Genesis.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where did you grow up, what did you study as an undergraduate, and what led you to pursuing theological education?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I grew up in Northeast Minneapolis and studied English at the University of Minnesota after spending a year at the Dunwoody College of Technology. Having come back to faith in my early twenties, I realized I wanted to pursue continuing education in biblical studies, philosophy, and theology. That, and the generous scholarship program<\/a><\/strong>, was how I ended up at Luther.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Luther<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

What are you hoping to do with your Luther Seminary degree?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Currently, I am continuing self-directed study\u2014mostly of Greek, Hebrew, and various areas of continental philosophy\u2014and hope to gain admittance to a Ph.D. or M.F.A. program. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tell us about the paper you submitted for the Milton Old Testament prize.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Metaphor, Absence, Poetics arose from my interest in theodicy. I wanted to know if there was any \u201cgood\u201d reason for the tree to be in the garden. A preliminary issue in this exploration is whether God\u2019s action is in any sense a contingency upon some other being or principle. If this world is merely the best of all possible worlds (as it is in Leibniz\u2019s conception) then the issue of theodicy\u2014how we maintain God is good and just in the face of evil and suffering\u2014is so much the easier. The problem is that this would seem to impugn God\u2019s omnipotence. I am discovering that many modern Bible scholars who have studied this issue do not believe Genesis 1 asserts creatio ex nihilo, which is in my view the formal and historic semantic by which we assert God\u2019s omnipotence. This introduces all sorts of sticky structural problems, and I touch on this in my paper. Where I primarily diverge from contemporary scholarship is in my understanding of how the Priestly witness (the P in Documentary Hypothesis) would assert a concept of “nothingness.” I am realizing that all discussion of “nothingness,” up to the present day, is basically metaphoric. All language is mediation, but the discourse of nothingness is a mediation of a mediation, so to speak.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think the Priestly source in Genesis 1 appropriates a polytheistic mythos to the end of a metaphor of “nothingness” in an attempt to affirm a strict monotheism. The problem of the passage, from a scholarly point of view, has always been that the presence of a polytheistic “fragment” (see Hermann Gunkel) simply does not make sense given the Priestly source’s monotheistic convictions. My instinct is that nothingness versus pre-existent material is the wrong dialectic for understanding Genesis 1.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Creatio ex nihilo is a useful concept to interpret what is going on in the passage, but for the Priestly source’s witness, the dialectic is not nothingness versus pre-existent material\u2014the dialectic is a transcendent “monotheistic” God versus polytheistic gods who arise from chaos. You could almost reduce the controversy to God or chaos. That’s what the Priestly source has to deal with to affirm a transcendent concept of God. The Priestly witness imagines for us a genesis of the world that sees God and nothing at the beginning of all things.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recent Luther Seminary graduate Ian Krueger received the John Milton Prize in Old Testament at commencement this year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-510","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry","8":"has-post-thumbnail"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.luthersem.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.luthersem.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.luthersem.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.luthersem.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.luthersem.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=510"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/inside.luthersem.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":524,"href":"https:\/\/inside.luthersem.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510\/revisions\/524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.luthersem.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.luthersem.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.luthersem.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}