Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
1 Chronicles 9:1 seems to bring the genealogies of 1 Chronicles to an end. The Chronicler has recorded the genealogy of the human race from Adam, focusing on the descendants of Abraham through Jacob. Summing it all up, he says, “So all Israel was enrolled by genealogies; and behold, they…
The “personalist” understanding of the Trinity, articulated most influentially in the work of John Zizioulas, has fallen on hard times. Recent scholars have attacked Zizioulas’s idea that Cappadocian Trinitarianism represented an ontological revolution, hammering on the distinction between divine and human personhood. Michel Barnes’s conclusion is the most drastic of…
Biblical Theology is often defined as the historical unfolding of God’s revelation, or of God’s revelation and of the history of his covenantal redemption and transformation of humanity and the world. In practice, Biblical Theology is usually broader than this, and also includes the study of literary structure and of…
We are made to be happy. Created to enter into the eternal joy of God, our whole being inclines to that end, but the fallen world has put forth barriers and by our own sin we bar ourselves from that endless delight, and death blinds us to that reality. Yet…
At the end of Revelation, John sees the heavenly city descending to earth. The city shines with the brilliance of God's glory, which lightens the nations, so that kings bring their glory to the city. This is not a vision of the final new heaven and new earth. It's a…
“No one has ever seen God,” writes John (John 1:18). If this is the case, then how can we speak about God? Some people say we actually cannot. Or at least we cannot speak about God positively, i.e. who He is. We can only say who or what God is…
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In Galatians 1, Paul twice says things happen “in him.” God reveals His Son “in me” (1:16). The phrase could mean “through me,” suggesting that Paul is an instrument of God’s unveiling of the Son. It’s just as possible, though, that Paul is himself the locus of that revelation; he…
According to Paul’s summary, the gospel is about Jesus’ self-gift, which plucks us from this present evil age (Galatians 1:4). What is that evil age? Paul’s use of “then/now” shows in the chapter shows what it means for him. The Galatians have heard about his zeal for the ancestral traditions…
Paul uses the noun “gospel” or the verb “evangelize/preach the gospel” twelve times in the first two chapters of Galatians. It is good news for the twelve tribes. While we can’t rest too much on grammatical forms, it is interesting to note the objects of the verb euaggelizo in these…
INTRODUCTION Jesus arrives in Jerusalem like a king (21:5) and immediately goes to the temple. It is His first visit to the temple in Matthew’s gospel, and He is not impressed. He condemns it as a robbers’ den, and then sets up His own ministry of healing in the house…
An English friend who knows whereof he speaks assures me that the statistics that I cited about the Royal Navy last week were off. The Royal Navy has 90 vessels, not 35 as I claimed (following Thomas Madden). Madden’s point still stands: The Royal Navy is only a fraction of…
The outgoing President has taken a lot of shots, some plausible but many preposterous. Madden notes that the claim that Bush has turned himself into a kind of American Augustus is historically naive: “Claiming that President Bush or any other American presidence is a new Pompey or Augustus is simply…
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