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Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.

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Apostle Paul

Jonah’s Pauline Move: Finding Mercy for Gentiles in Texts about Mercy for Israel

Jonah is Paul’s typological opposite. Indeed, in the whole Old Testament, it would be difficult to find a more perfect foil to Paul than Jonah. Whereas Paul crosses the sea to enact God’s saving purposes for the Gentiles, Jonah crosses the sea to avoid bringing Gentiles God’s mercy. For that…

by Josh JensenJanuary 11, 2024
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Family

A House for Me

Years ago, I realized that if my children wanted to feel like their house was a home, I needed to be intentional about making our physical shelter a place of spiritual refuge. I began to see the Holy Spirit as the indwelling person of the Trinity—the one who makes His…

by Mandi GerthJanuary 9, 2024
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Charity

On Parrhesia and Gospel Witness

When the crowds encircle Christ in Solomon’s Porch during the Festival of Dedication, they charge him: “tell us boldly who you are!” 1 They do not draw-up to him to with excited anticipation as they did earlier in the Gospel, 2 instead they flank him like a gang of wolves.…

by Mark BriansJanuary 4, 2024
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Deuteronomy

Misunderstanding Moses

1 In Deuteronomy 7:1-5, Moses wrote: When Yahweh your God brings you into the land which you go to possess, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations…

by Ralph Allan SmithJanuary 3, 2024
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Advent

40 Theses on Christmas

Every Advent witnesses the gruesome reanimation of the voice that whispers “you know , Christmas is just a pagan holiday…” with that sort of conversational ellipsis that does not so much invite further reflection but halts and forecloses it. The claims are several and equally spurious: Jesus wasn’t born on…

by Mark BriansDecember 26, 2023
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Genesis

The Twelve Trials of Abraham

Abraham's life in Genesis is a series of trials. He travels hundreds of miles from his family into a new land, flees from a famine into the hands of a king who takes his wife, and after returning, has to rescue his brother from a war. He's involved with two…

by Donald LinnemeyerDecember 26, 2023

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Theology

Hegel the pietist

Still further evidence that a) Hegel can’t get away from Kant’s pietism and b) Hamann would have been as right about Hegel as he was about Kant.  Jean-Marie Schaeffer writes of the impact of the incarnation on history: “it is through God’s becoming man, through the life and passion of…

September 22, 2009
Music

Music and modernity

Andrew Bowie ( Aesthetics and Subjectivity : From Kant to Nietzsche ) challenges the typical postmodern characterization of modern philosophy by highlighting music.  Heidegger views “the growth of the importance of music in modernity as grounded in an attitude to art based just upon feeling ‘which has been left to…

September 22, 2009

Scapegoat

Esau is a “hairy man” ( sa’iyr ), something we learn only when Jacob dresses himself in goat hair to approach his father (Genesis 27:11, 23). Jacob becomes a hairy one, subbing in for his brother. The only other use of the word in Genesis is in 37:31, where it…

September 22, 2009

Yahweh and Pharaoh

When Moses objects that he cannot speak, Yahweh assigns his “brother Aaron” to be his spokesman and prophet (Exodus 4:14; 7:1-2).  The next time Aaron is identified as Moses’ brother is in Exodus 28, where he is given the garments of glory and beauty to approach Yahweh, and the phrase…

September 22, 2009
Art

Christian art

Greek art, Hegel says, brings art to its summit.  This presents a difficulty: The greatest sensuous artistic form occurs within a polytheistic, inadequate religion. In Jean-Marie Schaeffer’s summary, Hegel resolves this by pointing to the very brokenness of the bodily form of Christ in Christian art: “in Christian art, Christ…

September 21, 2009
Philosophy

Against Empiricism

Heidegger got it exactly right: “We never really first perceive a throng of sensations, e.g., tones and noises, in the appearance of things . . . rather we hear the storm whistling in the chimney, we hear the three-motored plane, we hear the Mercedes in immediate distinction from the Volkswagen.…

September 21, 2009

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