I was interested to discover a new online journal the other day, Promissio: A Journal of Confessing Theology (open access, click here), with Winter 2026 being the first issue. My initial impression of it is fairly positive. In the midst of my ongoing quest to become the most thorough and helpful chronicler of academic journals for biblical studies, however, this new journal raises two questions for me: (1) How do I know it's legit? and (2) Where do I rank it in my list?
The first question becomes all the more significant since there are "predatory journals" out there even in biblical studies (I have seen them) that are not qualified to publish articles, and there are also journals, such as Religions and HTS Theological Studies that I would not consider "predatory" but which nonetheless have dubious academic credentials because they charge authors exorbitant prices while mass-producing hundreds of articles a year. Let me illustrate that with Religions: in 2024, this journal published 12 online-only issues. The first issue (Jan 2024) contained 140 articles. The second issue contained 110 articles. The twelth issue contained 159 articles. Average that out over 12 issues = 136 articles per issue (even though a few of those would have been invited articles, free from the authorial charge). Now Religions, as of June 2025, charges $2,193.15 per page converting from Swiss Francs). If we subtract 36 articles an issue, on average, as invited articles and thus free from charge, we end up with 1,200 articles a year, which comes out to more-or-less $219,300 a year from "Article Processing Charges." This is absurd, and most definitely the complete opposite of best practices for academic journals in biblical studies. In my opinion HTS Theological Studies is even less respectable than Religions these days, because in addition to their similarly-staggering author fees and mass-producing of articles, they have had to retract quite a few articles (e.g., vol. 79, no. 4; August 2023) and published (without retraction) an article that defended Haman and seemed to imply that the Jewish people were villains in the book of Esther (see my response in JSOT).
Now, I am pleased to report that Promissio passes that first test, evidencing no hint of profit-based mass-production. The journal does not, so far as I can tell, require that the author pays (and in my opinion no respectable journal in Biblical Studies, to my knowledge, does charges authors with the exception of OTE [at much lower rates than Religions]). In addition, the first issue has a very reasonable four main articles plus two review articles.
The second test is to check the editorial board. I sampled three, including Paul R. Hinlicky (general editor), who is quite well-published as a Lutheran theologian, clearly an excellent choice to add academic credibility to a journal. I had more difficulty analyzing the two others on the editorial board I randomly chose, however, in that they seemed to lack credentials in the area of peer-reviewed scholarship. Now, the journal does state that "All manuscripts for publication are reviewed by two scholarly peers in the area of the subject matter"; still, my main question for Promissio would be: "Are the peer-reviewers for the various articles themselves published specialists in regards to the content of the paper?" A fair analysis in this regard, however, would require a more thorough analysis of the editorial advisors and their CVs.
The third test would be to look at the journal's description of itself and its description of the article submission process. Both of them are generally solid, from an academic perspective, with one area of extra commendation. The journal's purpose can be summed up in this paragraph:
"The title of the journal, Promissio, points to the essential form of the word of God as the promise of forgiveness, life and salvation vouchsafed for us in the resurrection of Jesus the crucified Messiah. The subtitle of our journal points to the theological task as confessing concretely the liberating Lordship of Jesus with all that entails in the articles (articulations) of the faith in him for every new context as that has been heard afresh in the proclamation of the promising gospel. Promissio will be a journal that does confessing theology in continuity with the Lutheran Reformation by integrating the disciplines of theological exegesis of Scripture, church history, dogmatics and missiology that have been harmfully siloed in the modern period."
The area of extra commendation is that Promissio specifically mentions retractions and how it would handle them, not something I've seen too often in other journals.
One minor note regarding the design of the website (in case anybody from the editorial staff happens to read this): As of writing (2/27/26, 11:43 am Central US time) the page entitled "About the Journal" does not actually appear in the drop-down menu entitled "about." Consequently, it's a bit difficult to find the "About the Journal" page, which should ideally be in a prominent position.
So where should we place Promissio in the rankings? Although I overall liked what I saw, and the articles in the first issue seem to be pretty solid, it initially goes at level 4, just because it is brand new, but as soon as it begins to be cited in scholarly literature (even if that is primarily Lutheran literature), I would probably bump it up to level 3. Hypothetically this could go up to level 2 if it turned into one of the main Lutheran journals and was noticed significantly by non-Lutherans. For that reason we might see Wisconsin Lutheran Quarterly eventually bumped up to level 2, even though the SBL handbook does not list it. Denominationally oriented journals can indeed go fairly high, which is why at the suggestion of somebody in the comments section of my original post I bumped up Andrews University Seminary Studies to level 2.
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