Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In my previous two posts, I looked at aspects of Psalms 93, 95, 96 and 98 that declare Yahweh, the divine King, to be the world’s own Creator. In my next post, I plan to argue that the creation theology of the sub-section constituted by Psalms 93-100 contributes to the…
Ethika Politika has published a fascinating interview within which the French Catholic philosopher Fabrice Hadjadj discusses his recent work on the subject of sexuality. While there are many points where our lines of reasoning as Protestants will sharply diverge from Hadjadj’s, there is also much that is deeply perceptive in…
For anyone in Shakespeare’s audience who knew the real story of Macbeth, his play must have been surprising. Shakespeare changed so many important details of the historical Macbeth’s life that had Raphael Holinshed, the main author of the most popular history of the British Isles in Shakespeare’s day — Holinshed…
I started looking at a sequence of psalms on divine Kingship (Psalms 93-100) in my last post, part of a series looking at the Old Testament’s witness to Yahweh’s exercise of absolute mastery over his cosmos. I am not trying to “prove” a doctrine of creation ex nihilo directly from…
Most of the time I believe that dread is wise, anxiety righteous, fear a holy thing. It sounds ridiculous, but bear with me. There are days when fear seems to be not only a rational response to my circumstances, but a moral duty. After all, being a grown-up means responsibility.…
Get the Psalm 36 Translation here Psalm 36 begins with several translation problems. First, the first word in the actual psalm, as it is found in the English text, is the word "oracle." This word also begins the second verse in the medieval Massoretic Hebrew text, which is our basic…
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In his history of Christianity, August Neander distinguished between gnostics who arose from within Judaism and those whose inspiration came from “Oriental” modes of thought. Here is his description of the Jewish sources of gnosticism: In the following respect, all these Gnostics agree ; they all held . . .…
A few scattered notes from Jarl Fossum’s book examining the links between the figure of the “angel of Yahweh” in Samaritan theology and the “demiurge” of gnosticism. 1) Fossum points out that Simon Magus, legendarily the fountain of Gnosticism, venerated the Torah, and that some of the church Fathers said…
In a 2006 book on the origins of gnosticism, Carl B. Smith offers an alternative account of the connections of Judaism and gnosticism. According to the JETS reviewer: Smith “proposes that gnosticism arose in a social context of ‘alienated Judaism’ influenced by Greco-Roman and early Christian ideas in the aftermath…
In a book published in 1959, R. M. Grant attempted “to explain Gnosticism as arising out of the debris of apocalyptic-eschatological hopes which resulted from the fall or falls of Jerusalem.” According to a reviewer in Theology T0day , “Grant stresses the Jewish element which, as he rightly says, has…
Origen says that the Ophite demiurge had the face of a lion and was connected with Saturn, and this has led some scholars to conclude that Jaldabaoth was a combination of Baal and Kronos. John of Damascus says that the Phoenicians held Kronos to be a kind of demiurge, and…
According to Alfred Honig (writing in the late 19th century), the Ophite name for the demiurge, Jaldabaoth, comes from a Hebrew phrase meaning “child of chaos,” and the etymology goes back at least to the 1820s. Scholem argued, however, that the name was invented by a Jew and is a…
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