Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Thus says the Lord: “A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more” (Jer 31:15). The Night of the Hunter belongs on every Christian’s Christmas list. My family has even…
One important part of Jesus's birth narrative is the presence of angels. The angel Gabriel appeared to the Virgin Mary, announcing that she would bear a son. And then, on the night Jesus was born, a whole host of angels appeared to the shepherds. Angels are mysterious creatures to us.…
I was settled nicely into my chair and listening to the conversation in an undergrad religion seminar, my last required course to graduate. Though a few Christians sat scattered around the room, the course itself was dedicated to poking holes in traditional understandings of the Bible: our readings deconstructed notions…
God’s symbols belong to Him and to His people. They are constantly at work in the world, including the world of film, music, painting, architecture, and other artforms. You cannot escape God’s symbols or the meaning He has woven into the created order. Artists use and borrow God’s symbols, whether…
For centuries, Christians identified Israel in the Old Testament as a single, literal ethnic group, often called “the Jews.” Even supersessionists – those who believed the Church superseded Israel – assumed the clear-cut, technical definition of “Israel” in the Bible is the ethnic group. However, a deeper dive into Genesis,…
Misreading Intent In the opening verses of Matthew 11, the reader is confronted immediately by John the baptizer who has been imprisoned since 4:12. John poses a question to Jesus, inquiring from prison as to whether or not he is Israel’s awaited Messiah or if they should anticipate another: “Are…
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I have commented in the past on the bizarre Eucharistic imagery that ends Isaiah 49: “And I will feed your oppressors with their own flesh, And they will become drunk with their own blood as with sweet wine; And all flesh will know that I, the LORD, am your Savior,…
Throughout the 40s of Isaiah, Yahweh promises to do something unprecedented, something new, for Israel. He will bring them from bondage - but he’s done that before. This time, he will bring them back by using Gentiles as agents of Israel’s liberation. That’s a new thing, better than the Exodus,…
Linda Colley doesn’t think that the United Kingdom can remain united. In Acts of Union and Disunion , she following Benedict Anderson’s lead in claiming that nations are Imagined Communities , formed from myths and, as Colley says, “an attractive idea of what they are.” As summed up by the…
In his TLS review of Andrew Sanders’s In the Olden Time: Victorians and the British Past , AN Wilson suggests that Dickens was representative of his age in his “open hatred of the post, and his perky lower-middle-class joy in nowadays.” Not all Victorians shared Dickens’s progressivism: “Ruskin deplored Dickens’s…
A sketch of a Jensonian critique of historical criticism of Scripture: The Bible must be understood in its historical context. In practice, this means that the Bible’s historical claims are relativized to the discoveries of ancient historical investigation, archaeology, etc. If the bricks and pottery shards say that Jericho didn’t…
The book of Genesis is neatly divided into sections by toledoth statements: “These are the generations of” or some variation. The phrase means “these are the things generated by” so and so, and the things generated are often children. But there is a variation within the book between genealogies and…
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