Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Abbreviated Introduction to the Series Scripture is absolutely dripping with animal metaphors. Animal traits, characteristics, and appearances are attributed to God, Man, Angels, Nations, Armies. Since animals are the lowest creature in the three-tiered hierarchy, they are useful to metaphorically focus on a single aspect of God (bold like a…
Many years ago, while perusing Janice Anderson’s revised doctoral dissertation, Matthew’s Narrative Web: Over, and Over, and Over again , I was impressed by her attention to literary structures of repetition within and across Matthew’s Gospel. 1 Her research, in part, nudged me closer toward my present conviction that Matthew…
Abbreviated Introduction to the Series Scripture is absolutely dripping with animal metaphors. Animal traits, characteristics, and appearances are attributed to God, Man, Angels, Nations, Armies. Since animals are the lowest creature in the three-tiered hierarchy, they are useful to metaphorically focus on a single aspect of God (bold like a…
“Like a lily among the thorns, so is my love among the maidens… My beloved is mine and I am his; he pastures among the lilies.” Song 2:2, 16 In chapter two of the Song of Solomon, the Beloved compares his Love to a lily among thorns. The language of…
Introduction From the very beginning, angels and animals have played mediating roles between God and Man. Just as the World was made three-tiered (Heaven, Earth, Deep), so the creatures were made (Angels, Men, Animals). Before Christ came to build the permanent bridge across the chasm between God and Man, various…
Matthew 13, the third major discourse of the apostle’s gospel, is comprised almost entirely of parables. While it may seem that all the parables serve the same purpose in fulfilling the prophet Isaiah (Matthew 13:14), the parables found in verses 44–52, at the very least, function outside that purpose. This…
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Reformed theology has always stressed the utter sovereignty of God. He has planned all things, and works all things. But in certain forms of Reformed theology, this is subtly undermined and turns into its opposite. I’m thinking of Reformed theology (a hyper-Calvinist tendency) that so stresses God’s sovereignty that it…
Over at Grantland , Wesley Morris traces the shift in romantic comedy in the 1980s to the politicization of the genre: “By the 1980s, romantic comedy had started to turn inward, away from fights between two equals. Women took center stage — unless the movie was Tootsie , in which…
Mark tells us in a parenthetical aside that Jesus purged all meats, and Peter saw a vision that taught him that he could eat anything (Acts 10-11). Still, as Allen Frantzen details in his recent Food, Eating, and Identity in Early Medieval England , Western Christians continued to observe purity…
Gabriella Coleman has done field work on the group “Anonymous,” and argues in Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy that the group is not violent or dangerous. They’re only out for laughs, laughs of a particular kind indicated by the term lulz, which Coleman defines as “a deviant style of humor and…
Moses tells Pharaoh that Israel has to leave Egypt to perform their sacrifice before Yahweh because what they intend to do is abominable to the Egyptians. Why would it be abominable? For starters, bulls were divine - or at least mediated gods - to the Egyptians. Not appropriate for slaughter.…
Science and faith seem to be at odds. Many have suggested that’s because believers look to faith to do thing faith can’t do; if we adjusted our expectations about what kind of truth religion gives, science would be freed from the annoyances of the faithful, Tom McLeish ( Faith and…
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