Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Inspired by the “Moscow Mood” Debate In a shocking 1961 study, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram would don an official-looking white lab coat and tell a volunteer to administer increasing shocks to another “volunteer” in an adjacent room strapped into an “electric chair” just out of sight. The shocks were incrementally…
My title and the substance of the article are borrowed from a section of David Wenham’s excellent book, Paul: Follower of Jesus or Founder of Christianity? I am appropriating ideas from the pages in his book which address the question, “Why Does Paul refer to Jesus’ Life and Ministry so…
Some of us may be familiar with the notion that the epistle of James is like a New Testament version of Proverbs or other wisdom literature. According to this line of thinking, the epistle of James (together with the other wisdom literature) is basically a collection of timeless sayings without…
This summer I started walking a long trail that ran north from our home. On my best days, I would walk a total of five miles at a brisk pace. This trail follows the power lines that serve a significant portion of North Dallas and stretches far past the two…
I am an Australian. I went to the American Academy of Religion mega-fest last year to meet up with some friends, to present a paper at a ‘science and religion’ panel, and to marvel at the sheer scale of how Americans do things. It was quite a ride. Looking at…
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 We evangelicals do not often understand the roles of men and women in ministry. Because our consumerist culture has gutted the notion of family as it was historically understood, all Biblical passages about women in church ministry (a familial organism) are almost incomprehensible to…
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CS Lewis says that language cannot do what music and gesture do, that is, “do more than one thing at once.” He admits that “the words in a great poet’s phrase interinanimate one another and strike the mind as a quasi-instantaneous chord, yet, strictly speaking, each word must be read…
INTRODUCTION At the middle of Matthew’s story of Jesus, Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ ( 16:16 ). But he doesn’t yet understand what that means. He still has to learn that being Christ means taking up a cross and losing life to find it. THE TEXT “When Jesus…
Matthew uses the word “sign” in only four contexts. In the closely parallel passages 12:38-45 and 16:1-4, the Jewish leaders ask Jesus for a sign; the word is used several times in chapter 24, and a last time in 26:48 to describe Judas’s kiss. Chapters 12 and 16 are obviously…
Yahweh rained bread from heaven to test Israel, to see if they would follow His instructions (Exodus 16:4). They didn’t follow Him. Instead, they disobeyed the instructions about manna (16:13-21) and turned the tables to put God to the test (17:2, 7). Jesus follows the same pattern. He is Bread…
The Pharisees and Sadducees ask Jesus for a sign from heaven (Matthew 16:1). The first “signs” in the heavens were the sun, moon, and stars. A sign from heaven is a sign of new creation, and Jesus’ response, alluding to the evening-morning pattern of the creation week, continues the creation…
The tide started turning against the etymologists during the Renaissance. In Praise of Folly , Erasmus mocked the theologians for their obsessions with the minutiae of words: “I met with another, some eighty years of age, and such a divine that you’d have sworn Scotus himself was revived in him.…
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