Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The god of Israel was not just any god. Two thousand years of Christian history, with it’s besetting philosophical temptations, and full-blown deist and transcendentalist and universalist problems, have obscured the fact that, in itself, the identity of the true god (or gods) cannot be predetermined, any more than the…
Jacob and Solomon God gave wealth and possessions to Jacob, and then threatened to take them all away at Peniel. Jacob wrestled with God, and through prayer Jacob saw through the crisis by faith and was made victor (Hosea 12:4). The Kingdom period in Israel concerns the same themes. We…
In our study of the historical impact and unfolding of the Ten Words of God, we now arrive at the Third Word. The Third Word prohibits hypocrisy, and when we realize this, we can see right away that disobeying the Third Word is closely tied to the situation of Israel…
Abraham and Joshua In our previous two essays, we considered aspects of the lives of Abraham and Jacob, as these display how God works with men in history. These two men carry in themselves all the future of Israel, so to speak, and their lives at the individual level correspond…
Part 5: Laying New Foundations in a Dying World (continued) Physical Training Though it is seldom recognized any more, the fact is that no liberal arts and no science is possible apart from peace, and peace is only possible if there is a strong military presence that protects a nation.…
Last month, in our essay " Patriarchal Dominion ," we observed the flow from Abraham to Jacob to Joseph. Our concern here is to advance our understanding of that narrative flow. I should mention that I am assuming much that is found in my book Primeval Saints: Studies in the…
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The numbering of the sealed in Revelation 7 alludes to the census events of the book of Numbers. There, Moses initially numbers men twenty years and older, mustering them as the troops that will conquer the land. (The second census, in Numbers 26, includes women and has a different focus.)…
The “personalist” understanding of the Trinity, articulated most influentially in the work of John Zizioulas, has fallen on hard times. Recent scholars have attacked Zizioulas’s idea that Cappadocian Trinitarianism represented an ontological revolution, hammering again and again the distinction between divine and human personhood. Michel Barnes’s conclusion is the most…
Protestant soteriology claims to deal with perennial patterns of behavior and belief: Striving for approval from God by our performance, self-righteousness, works-righteousness, pride in our achievements, etc. Let’s grant that these are perennial patterns of behavior, though they will likely take various forms in different cultural settings. That’s not just…
Theodore Jennings ( Transforming Atonement , 158) observes that “what is visible on the grand scale of imperial political history also lodges itself in the dynamics of quite small-scale communities, including those that may seem to be, and may think of themselves as, and may even in important respects actually…
Markus Barth ( Acquittal by Resurrection ) sharply raises the question of the justice of God’s verdict of justification. How can God pronounce the guilty innocent, the ungodly righteous? Barth raises the stakes by insisting that the justice should be evident to all: “If after the proclamation of a verdict,…
Over at the Theopolis Institute site , I offer some reflections on the liturgical formation of culture through a consideration of the biblical anatomy of human action.
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