Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Brian: This is, I guess, the ultimate news flash. Maybe the last one. Just a couple of minutes ago a lot of people ascended up into the air and met the returning Jesus Christ. At least that seems to be what happened. As you can see, our cameras are on…
Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who knows where mythology leaves off and history begins–or which id which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that…
One of the mysteries in Esther is why Mordecai refused to acknowledge Haman. We are never explicitly told, and such guesses as that he was continuing Yahweh’s war against Amalek do not carry weight. If such was Mordecai’s purpose he was in sin, because it was Yahweh’s war, not his.…
Below are two views of marriage that came out of an e-mail exchange. The first is a kind of of phenomenology of marriage, and of behavior within marriage. It is who we are by nature. It is bad news, very bad news. The second entry is what can be done…
The previous essay on “Monocovenantalism” brought up this matter, so a few comments here. In this area also the mindless militants have perverted the conversation. The notion that the death of Jesus was insufficient for our justification and that we must also have an imputation of His perfect life in…
Repeatedly over the last several years a variety of characters have accused the so-called “Federal Vision” of being “monocovenantal.” Many other wild and unsubstantiated accusations against the “Federal Vision” have been made, of course. Recently I learned that two of the men on the Orthodox Presbyterian Church’s study committee on…
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The story is told of the desert father Abba Apollo, who was appalled when he encountered a devil without knees. John Ratzinger wrote of this story “The inability to kneel is seen as the very essence of the diabolical.”
Malcolm Ruel, again in the Blackwell Reader in the anthropology of religion, traces the changing meanings of “faith.” For the Hebrew Bible, ‘mn “denotes . . . a quality of relationship: it was used of the reliability or trustworthiness of a servant, a witness, messenger, or a prophet, but is…
Asad identifies the particular moment when “Christianity” (in the pejorative sense I’ve used it) was invented: In the wake of the post-Reformation wars, Lord “Herbert produced a substantive definition of what later came to be formulated as Natural Religion - in terms of beliefs (about a supreme power), practices (its…
The aforementioned reader in anthropology of religion includes Talal Asad’s essay on the construction of “religion” as an anthropological concept. He argues that it is usually assumed, for instance, that medieval “religion” was the same in essence as modern religion, but that “its social extension and function were different in…
The second edition of the Blackwell Reading in the Anthropology of Religion (edited, Michael Lambek) looks to be a great resource, for those who like such things. There are classic essays from Tylor, Durkheim, Weber, and Geertz, Wittgenstein on Frazer, Susanne Langer on symbols and Mary Douglas on clean and…
In his Theology of the New Testament (Zondervan, 2005), Frank Thielman responds to the claim that justification is secondary to participation with Christ in Paul’s theology. Thielman does not agree, but he does say that it is true that “Paul’s references to the death of Christ more often support his…
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