Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Gambling The Bible nowhere condemns gambling, and so we need to be careful in our assessment of it. Let me begin by making a strong case against gambling. Then I will surprise most readers by pointing out that gambling may not always be sinful. The reader should bear in mind…
Tim Powers, The Stress of Her Regard (Ace Books, 1991). Reviewed by Jeffrey Meyers. Tim Power’s latest novel is now available in paperback. The story is set in early nineteenth century England and Italy, in the world of the poets John Keats, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron. Michael Crawford, a…
A close supporter of Biblical Horizons asks whether it is proper and wise to get involved in all the boycotts that Christians are being asked to observe today. She raises the point that Paul’s advice about eating meat sacrificed to idols seems relevant to the discussion. I think she is…
Solomon began to build the Temple of the Lord in the fourth year of his reign, which was 480 years after Israel came out of Egypt, the year A.M. 2993 (1 Kings 6:1). Seven years later, in the year A.M. 3000, the Temple building was finished (1 Kings 6:38). The…
Several months back, a candidate for ordination was being examined for entrance into the Presbytery of which I am a member. The candidate had a good deal of trouble with the exam on the sacraments, stumbling badly as he tried to define the "nature of the sacrament." Apparently in an…
Exploring the influence of televangelism on American religion in his book, The Struggle for America’s Soul , Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow presents a typical, though hypothetical, case study: Mabel Miller. Mabel lives alone, thousands of miles from her family. She grew up in a Baptist Church, but now, approaching 65,…
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W e should, Paul Griffiths says ( Decreation , 324–5), be careful about the aesthetic judgments we make: “every human creature's formation in the discernment and delight in beauty is different, and because each of us is badly damaged with respect to our capacity to make reliable judgments about the…
As recorded in the supplement to the Summa , Thomas Aquinas teaches that the damned will rise again with bodies and will be tormented in hell corporeally. This leaves open questions about the materiality of the various biblical descriptions of those torments, and in question 97 of the supplement, Thomas…
In his Organizing Enlightenment , Chad Wellmon explains how the modern research university was a response to a crisis of “information overload.” The Enlightenment saw an explosion of new knowledge and research. The Enlightenment empire of erudition was a bookish empire. Philosophes imagined they could provide a unified account of…
If the infinite God is to be present within a finite creation, writes David Bentley Hart ( Beauty of the Infinite , 204), “the finite must . . . become ever more open, ever greater and more capacious . . . ; and creaturely mutability allows for this.” Hart is…
T he name of R.J. Rushdoony, the polymathic Reformed theologian, historian, and activist, has appeared with increasing frequency in accounts of the religious right. There is a small industry in screeds warning of the dire threat of theocracy, and Rushdoony plays the role of the father of all theocrats. It's…
The prophecy of Habakkuk closes with a lovely poem of joy in the midst of adversity and lack (Habakkuk 3:17-19). The poem opens with six lines that describe the barrenness of the land. It is a nihil-land; the Hebrew negative lo' occurs twice (“fig tree does not blossom”; “the field…
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