Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Part 1 We do not understand the role of women in ministry because we do not understand the role of men in ministry. We do not understand the role of men in ministry because we do not understand the church. We do not understand the church because the consumer culture…
1. One structure The Creation account (G1:1-2:4) conspicuously conveys meaning using the literary shape of the text. The narrative is told with formulaic patterns, repetitions, and parallelism. The Garden account is different. It is viewed as a separate text, with its own author, employing its own structure. This second account’s…
I was reading James Jordan’s Creation in Six Days while also preparing for Trinity Sunday in which the gospel reading is John 3:1-15. As providence would have it Jordan dropped an easter egg for me along the lines of baptism. In chapter 5 he points out, “ On the second…
It's true. There is no verse in the New Testament that commands or records an infant baptism. This poses a problem for some Christians. Those who only look for explicit commands, or those whose theology is limited to the New Testament, will conclude that infant baptism is not biblical and…
1. Goal This paper’s goal is to identify and describe a literary strategy employed by scripture, namely using two episodes that cover similar territory or themes using details drawn from opposite ends of a number of spectrums. Once described the reader may recognize numerous other instances of this strategy in…
Numbers 14 records the tragic story of Israel’s decision to rebel against Yahweh and Moses. Twelve spies had been sent into the land to bring back a report to Israel. All twelve spies agreed: “We went to the land where you sent us. It truly flows with milk and honey”…
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Jesus observes that Israel wanders like sheep without a shepherd, so He sends the Twelve to be shepherds to the “lost sheep of the house of Israel.” In the next breath, He says that the Twelve go out as “sheep in the midst of wolves.” So which are they? Sheep…
“Be wise as serpents,” Jesus says. The first wise serpent in the Bible is a deceiver. Is Jesus encouraging His disciples to use deception to protect themselves? In part, the answer is a tentative Yes. Paul escaped the ethnarch Aretas in a basket let down through a window in the…
Martin Amis’s 2001 collection of criticism was entitled The War Against Cliche . Now he comes out with The Second Plane: September 11: 2001-2007 . According to Marjorie Perloff (in the TLS), it’s mostly cliche. There are religious cliches. Though the age of ideology in the last century was bad,…
Clever move by the McCain campaign: A scandalous piece in the NYT becomes an opportunity to rally the right to McCain’s side. The piece and the campaign’s well-organized and long-anticipated response puts the anti-McCain right into a bind: If they jump in against McCain, they’re in bed with Media Enemy…
Rahner says, “if the ordination [toward the supernatural] cannot be detached from nature, the fulfillment of the ordination from God’s point of view is exacted.” Reno explains, “this obligatory or necessary fulfillment violates the logic of love. There can be no ‘must’ of this sort in the relationship of self-giving.”…
This is fuzzy, but let me try to write toward clarity. The great problem for the nouvelle theologie , Rahner, and neo-scholasticism was to preserve the gratuity of grace. If man is created with an inbuilt orientation toward a supernatural fulfillment, then God cannot deny the supernatural fulfillment “without offending…
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