About Vicky

Vicky is the Director of Biblical Studies and teaches New Testament at the ACD. She is a founding member, editor and writer in the internationally acclaimed Earth Bible series, which develops a critical and nuanced approach to interpreting Scripture in solidarity with the Earth community (the interconnected web of life). Vicky was a post-doctoral fellow at the Hebrew University, and has worked as a visiting scholar in Heidelberg, Germany. She has taught in Thailand and India, including an intensive at McGilvary College of Divinity in Chiang Mai, and as visiting scholar in the Diocese of Madras. She was elected into membership of the international Society of Biblical Studies (SNTS) in 2017.

Vicky has long-term connections with a remote Aboriginal community, and works together with Indigenous writers who are developing their own hermeneutical approaches to reading the Bible.

 

She writes:

This is a picture of Rev. Dr. Auntie Denise Champion and me in November 2020 – just after she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Divinity. Fantastic achievement!

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Units taught by Vicky

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• MINS1201 Interpreting the New Testament

• MINS2216 Pauline Literature

• MINS2219 Synoptic Gospels

• MINS3002 Biblical Hermeneutics

• MINS3218 John's Gospel and the Johannine Epistles

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Recent Publications

• ‘Where is Philemon? The Case for a Logical Fallacy in the Correlation of the Data in Philemon and Colossians 1.1-2; 4:7-18’, JSNT 38(2) 2015, 131-150. 2015

• “Stoic Echoes in non-Stoic Sources: Exploring Stoic Influence in the First and Second Centuries CE.” in Living in a Cultural Wilderness, Modern Greek Studies (Australia and New Zealand) Supplementary volume, eds. George Couvalis, Michael Tsianikas and Maria Palaktsoglou,  Special Issue of Modern Greek Studies, Australia and New Zealand, 2017.

• Vicky Balabanski & Geraldine Hawkes, editors, Receptive Ecumenism:Listening, Learning and Loving in the Way of Christ, ATF Press. 2018

• ‘Colossians 1.23. A Case for Translating ἐπιμένετε (Continue) as Imperative, not Indicative’, in Tyndale Bulletin 70.1 (2019) 85-94.

• Colossians: An Eco-Stoic Reading, Bloomsbury, T & T Clark.

• ‘Deep Incarnation, the Suffering of Creatures and the Letter to the Colossians’, in God in the Natural World: Theological Explorations in Appreciation for Denis Edwards. Editors: Ted Peters & Marie Turner (Adelaide: ATF Press, 2020).

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Qualifications

• Bachelor of Arts Honours, University of Melbourne

• Bachelor of Divinity, Melbourne College of Divinity

• PhD, University of Melbourne

• Postdoctoral fellowship, Hebrew University (Golda Meir Postdoctoral Fellowship)

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Positions

• Director of Biblical Studies

• Chair of the ACD Ethics Committee

• Chair of the Postgraduate Committee

• Member of the Academic Board

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About

• Minister of the Word in the Uniting Church

• Loves revegetating a coastal block on the Yorke Peninsula