Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Christians get sex wrong when we start from the wrong end. We start from human desires, passions, biological drives and “needs.” These are treated as givens, as the base-line natural reality of human sexuality. Then we come to the Bible and find, to our surprise, that God places all kinds…
Why isn't Proverbs better known as the Bible's book on "manliness"? I use quotation marks because the term almost seems archaic in our present culture, along with "manhood." Perhaps the Church is too embarrassed to admit the Bible addresses that much attention to the topic. But another reason can be…
In certain evangelical Christian churches it is the tradition to exalt preaching above the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Ever since the rise of Revivalist preachers pushing for conversions, the practice has cast doubt upon the possibility of Baptism or the Lord’s Supper being a “means of grace”…
Perhaps one of the most stimulating sections of Yoram Hazony’s The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture addresses the question of how we are to discern the meaning of biblical narratives, especially how biblical narratives might present arguments of a more general nature. Hazony quotes John Barton’s remarks about the difficulty of…
In this slender volume, Joseph Minich (Ph.D. student at the University of Dallas) attempts to answer some of the deepest questions of human existence. With his honesty, his probing questioning, his wide reading, and his ability to plunge beneath superficial answers, he provides a helpful source of reflection for fellow…
A Closer Look at Noah’s Post-Flood Humiliation In Genesis 9:20-27 My wife is currently leading a Bible study through Genesis for a group of insatiable Bible students. Because she is a deep thinker and has a high view of inspiration, there is no passage she is unwilling to face head…
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Spinoza summarizes the common opinion of his day: “They suppose, forsooth, that God is inactive so long as nature works in her accustomed order, and vice versa , that the power of nature and natural causes are idle so long as God is acting: thus they imagine two powers distinct…
Spinoza writes in his Theologico-Political Treatise that “the sign of circumcision is, as I think, so important, that I could persuade myself that it would preserve the nation forever. Nay, I would go so far as to believe that if the foundations of their religion have not emasculated their minds…
Calvin described Scripture as an accommodation to human capacities - God babbles to us like a parent to a baby. Spinoza and Galileo appealed to the same principle. For Galileo, it was a way of retaining the truth of Scripture, at least as regards matters of faith, while also maintaining…
Frampton’s book makes it clear that the appeal of Cartesian method was its promise to cut through the fog of skepticism and debate and get to demonstrable certainty. Lodeqijk Meyer’s preface to Spinoza’s Principia philosophiae Cartesianae (1663) makes this explicit: “You will find that with the exception of mathematics hardly…
When the Arminian pastor at Warmond was dismissed from his post after Dordt, the congregation refused the Gomarist pastor sent to fill the vacancy. Instead, led by Gijsbert van der Kodde, the church organized itself into a “college,” a democratically organized Bible study group, devoted, as they thought, to the…
Grotius “proved” the truth of the Bible by saying that “in their stories as well as in the rules they give, nothing is taught that is unworthy of God, nothing that is not conducive to the best conduct of life, whereas poets, philosophers and all those who claim to instruct…
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