Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In a recent article in Biblical Horizons , I argued that the imagery of James 1:21 alludes to baptism, and particularly to baptism as an ordination and incorporation into the holy priesthood. This understanding of baptism as ordination to priesthood is not, I have since discovered, original, but in fact…
He will be a priest on his throne, and the counsel of peace will be between the two of them (Zechariah 6:13b). A prime difficulty in the interpretation of this verse is the antecedent of the pronoun "them." A number of alternatives have been offered. Some suggest that the "two"…
Like certain kinds of music, the unchanging rhythm of Aquinas's Summa gets into your bones. Read a few sections and it begins to run through your head. You start drumming your fingers, humming, swaying gently to the rhythm of Videtur-Sed Contra-Responsio, Videtur-Sed Contra-Responsio, “It seems-On the contrary-I answer.” The only…
The Book of Revelation is a gold mine of liturgical information. The various hymns and exclamations in Revelation have always been used in Christian worship. As I have been studying Revelation this year, it occurred to me that make a complete hymn out of the various hymns in the book.…
In the book of Revelation we find a triad of Strong Angels, and another triad of Other Angels. The purpose of this essay is to explore the Biblical background of these two sets, and thus fill out their meaning. The first triad of angels we encounter in the Bible comes…
In Revelation, the term aggelos means messenger, of course, but with a special emphasis on messenger as covenant administrator. This is immediately obvious from the fact that the angels are constantly acting to enforce the covenant one way or another: sealing people, bringing judgment, calling for repentance, etc. They are…
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Peter Hanns Reill, ed., and Ellen Judy Wilson, principal author, Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment (revised edition; New York: Facts on File, 2004), 670pp. Contemporary critics of modernity, including Christian ones, often focus their attacks on ?The Enlightenment,?Ethe intellectual and cultural movement that endured through the ?long eighteenth century?Ebetween Louis XIV…
William Langewiesche, The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime (New York: North Point Press, 2004), 239pp. Landlubbers that we are, most tend to forget that, as William Langewiesche puts it, “our world is an ocean world.” First published as a series of articles in The Atlantic ,…
Marjorie Garber offers many interesting insights into the themes of Shakespeare?s Comedy of Errors in her recent Shakespeare After All . Here are several of the highlights of her analysis: 1) She points out that, like many of Shakespeare?s comedies, the crisis of Comedy of Errors is provoked by ?an…
INTRODUCTION When the prophet Shemaiah confronted Rehoboam, the king turned from his plan (1 Kings 12:21-24). But Jeroboam is not so responsive to the word of the Lord. A man of God from Judah confronts him at his altar at Bethel (13:1-3), and Jeroboam responds by trying to arrest the…
Richard Neuhaus has his gleeful fun attacking John Milbank in the November 2004 issue of First Things . I don’t think he’s entirely fair to Milbank’s political thought, and his charge that Milbank’s attack on the Catholic Church is an “annoyingly unremitting rant” that is “mainly a product of deep-seated…
Barth interestingly ( CD 1.1, p. 410) suggests a correspondence between soteriology and Trinitarian theology: “reconciliation or revelation is not creation or a continuation of creation but rather an inconceivably new work above and beyond creation, so we have also to say that the Son is not the Father but…
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