Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In this essay we will think about how the whole Bible is structured as one Word of God. To begin with, there is only one Bible, not two. While we divide the Bible into Old and New Testaments, that division has no more meaning than divisions into chapters and verse,…
How should one badly bruised and inadequate church relate to another? (I am not addressing the blessed possessors of absolutely perfect churches, naturally.) I believe there are three things to bear in mind. First, we must be open to the values in other Christian traditions - even Roman Catholic and…
The third and sixth day have a second creative act. Note the chiastic arrangement of the material in these special acts and the parallelism between them, see the figure below. The author arranges the description of each day as a chiasm. Each line in the chiasm is mated with a…
Now the two of them were naked, the man and his woman, and they did not sense shame (Genesis 2:25) The nakedness of Adam and Eve requires several comments. First of all, against those who think that nakedness is what God intended for humanity as a permanent estate, we have…
I’ve been reflecting on the meaning of integration, and our longing for integration in a fragmented world. I’ve been connecting my own covenant epistemology further with the thought of scientist-philosopher Michael Polanyi, artist Makoto Fujimura, and Classical Christian metaphysician D.C. Schindler. In my last post , and now in this…
Luke 13:31-33 is one of the strangest passages in the Gospel of Luke. It begins with a time note that sounds emphatic “At that very hour.” Then, we are told of Pharisees bringing a message that Herod wants to kill Jesus! In His answer, Jesus speaks of a three day…
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W hatever else the 2016 Presidential cycle has accomplished, it has brought the chasm between nationalism and globalism into sharp relief. Many see this divide as the issue of the campaign ( Robert Merry ) or of the century ( Pat Buchanan ). It seems to be a choice we…
G enealogies occupy a large portion of the opening chapters of the Bible, tracing a line from Adam and Eve through ten generations to Noah. Noah fathers a new human race through his three sons, the 70 nations listed in Genesis 10. From 2 (Adam and Eve, Noah and Mrs.…
Prayers for the blessing of a house, adapted from this order of house blessing. A t the doorway : O God, heavenly Father, Lord of heaven and earth, protect our going out and our coming in. Banish demons, defeat all curses, and station your angels at this door. Shine the…
P astor Rich Lusk of Trinity Presbyterian Church, Birmingham, Alabama, points out that, narratively, the entire gospel of Mark takes place during the night. The sun sets in Mark 1:32 and there is no reference to a sunrise until 16:2, on the first day of the week when the women…
B en Lerner remembers his youthful play with half-understood words, and finds there a clue to the meaning of poetry: “I remember my feeling that I possessed only part of the meaning of the word, like one of those fragmented friendship necklaces, and I had to find the other half…
B en Lerner discovers the power of linguistic repetition in childhood games: “every kids know the phenomenon that psychologists call ‘semantic saturation,' wherein a word is repeated until it feels emptied of sense and become mere sound - ‘to repeat, monotonously, some common word, until the sound, by dint of…
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