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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Sanballat hears about Nehemiah’s project of rebuilding Jerusalem after the exile, he becomes angry and mocks the Jews: “Can they finish in a day? Can they revive the stones from the heaps of dust even the burned ones” (Nehemiah 4:2). The taunt is theologically significant. “Finish” is kalah , the…
John describes the angel’s position in Revelation 10 in great detail. The angel straddles land and sea, but for some reason John thinks it important to record that the angels right foot is on the sea and left foot on the land. Assuming that the shoreline in question is the…
Several months ago, I wrote a First Things essay on the life and ministry of Pastor Tom Clark of Tri-City Covenant Church in Somersworth, New Hampshire. Tom died shortly after that essay appeared, but during his last days we were able to spend a couple of days listening to and…
Irene Gedalof argues in Against Purity that feminists have been too much in the grip of a binary logic that actually undermines feminism. What she has in mind is the notion that women can be defined in terms of a pure category of “Woman” or “Feminine.” On the contrary, women’s…
Brian Pennington’s Was Hinduism Invented? includes a brief outline of William Ward’s 1817 treatise on the History, Literature and Religion of the Hindoos . He describes the missionary Ward as one of the “first Europeans to adopt an ethnographic stance” (79). Pennington continues: “He turned from linguistic and textual studies…
David Wootton’s TLS review of Quentin Skinner’s Forensic Shakespeare is a primer on Elizabethan law and legal rhetoric. Wootton tells us, “We tend to think rhetoric is about using figures of speech, but that was only a small part of the orator’s training, which relied both on textbooks inherited from…
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