Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
If you’re a preacher looking for good commentaries on Ezra, you’ll struggle. Certainly to find ones that wrestle in good detail with the text. And certainly ones that don’t cost you an arm and a leg. There’s a good bit more for Nehemiah, which is odd, as the two are…
Quick thought experiment: try to pretend you’ve never read 1 John before. Read 1:1-6. Go ahead; I’ll wait. Now, on to v. 7: “But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with ______….” What word would you expect in that blank, based…
In my work as a Bible translator, I was recently checking our translation team’s draft of Genesis 8:8, which says of Noah (translating the Hebrew quite literally): And he sent out the dove from with him to see: had the waters lessened from upon the face of the ground? Part…
Just in case a reader may not know Weinberg, he is a theoretical physicist and the winner of the Nobel prize in physics in 1979, as well as countless other prizes for his research. He is also a prolific, lucid, and captivating writer. If you want to read something on…
Colossians 1:15-20 is a famous passage in Paul’s epistles because it is a succinct and powerful poem. It appears even to have been a hymn. Given the uniquely Pauline language — “reconciliation” is a term used only by Paul — it should not seem odd to attribute the poem/hymn to…
Stalker (1979) is a film by Andrei Tarkovsky based on Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers. It shows a day from the life of a stalker, a man who enters the so-called "Zone", an Alien landing site, where he leads people to a room that grants people’s innermost desires, which…
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Melanchthon wrote, “The views of Erasmus might have caused greater tumults if Luther had not arisen to arrest them . . . all of this tragedy about the Lord’s Supper started from him.” Melanchthon had in mind Erasmus’s Neo-platonic disparagement of matter, which infected Zwingli and filtered into Anabaptist theology.…
Zechariah predicts that Tyre will be dispossessed and her wealth cast into the sea (v. 4), and then the city will be “consumed with fire.” The verb is the common verb for “eating,” and the picture of an “eating fire” sends the mind back to the sacrificial system, where the…
Zechariah 9:1-4 focuses on the conquest of Tyre, the “wise” city, shrewd at least in amassing wealth (v. 3). But the celebratory description contains a subversive pun. The Hebrew for Tyre is tsor (“rock”), and Zechariah says that Tyre has built herself a fortress, a word built on the same…
In the second edition of African Religions and Philosophy (1989), John Mbiti says that Africans generally lack a concept of the future. Their future tenses reach only a short time into the past, and one people leave the present they are absorbed into an atemporal afterlife. Mbiti notes as well…
E.B. Tylor was the first to characterize African religions as “animist,” remarking that “one great element of religion, that moral element which among the higher nations forms its most vital part, is indeed little represented in the religion of the lower races.” Others characterized the”lower religions” as “fetishist” because of…
Tatian’s Oration to the Greeks is an attempt to vindicate the wisdom of Moses against Greek snobbery toward the barbarians. Aime Puech points out that chronology was central to Tatian’s argument: “In order to rehabilitate the Barbarians it was important to prove that they had contributed their share, indeed the…
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