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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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Philosophy

Reason and reasoning

Knight criticizes Frederick Beiser’s treatment of rationality in the early English Enlightenment because he “does not relate ‘reason’ to reasoning together, converse, public talk, and the skills of the development of public talk. Reason therefore for him never appears as faith doing what it must do to remain faithful -…

June 26, 2008

Atonement and Anthropology

Knight writes at the end of a couple of chapters exploring Israel’s calling and the role of her cult in that calling: “I have presented my atonement theory as a general anthopological theory. I have developed a Christology that serves as a general anthropology. I am not setting out first…

June 25, 2008

Worshiping Jesus

In making a structural point about Matthew’s references to “worship” of Jesus last week, I skimmed a bit too lightly over the details. Reader Ronald Man caught me, and offered these comments: There is no indication that the Magi (or Herod) recognized Jesus’ deity; rather it is clearly stated that…

June 25, 2008

Bio-Theology

One of the intriguing threads in Knight is his rehabilitation of biology within theology - or, more specifically, the inclusion of “blood and seed, of sonship and messiah, of holiness and purity” within pneumatology. Contesting the common opposition of fictive and biological kinship, he says that “we should understand ‘fictive’…

June 24, 2008

Political hermeneutics

Knight again: “autonomous exegesis that does not stay in conversation with doctrine and philosophy cannot read Israel’s Scriptures as a political-cosmological world-claim. Without learning from doctrine and political philosophy, would-be exegetes of the Bible are unlikely to understand Israel’s cosmology as a public claim to commandeer, transform, and reemploy the…

June 24, 2008
Biblical Studies

Israel and the nations

Knight has a lot of intriguing things to say about Israel and the nations, among them: “As Israel suffers the gentile onslaughts, Israel is half-persuaded that it has to compete with the Gentiles as an equal rather than as their lord; Israel has to fight them as thought it were…

June 24, 2008

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