Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The drink offering or libation ( nesek ) is mentioned in only three places in the book of Leviticus. When the sheaf of the firstfruits was waved before the Lord, a grain offering was to be burned, along with "its libation, a fourth of a hin of wine [approx. one…
When I became a Calvinist it wasn't long before I learned that John Owen’s The Death of Death in the Death of Christ was regarded as the masterful treatise on what is known as "Limited Atonement"--the "L" in the TULIP mnemonic device for "the five points of Calvinism." This wasn't…
One of the advantages of paying very close attention to the details in the Bible, especially chronological and genealogical details, is that they can shed light on situations that don’t seem to make much sense apart from them. One such situation is that of Bathsheba. It appears that Bathsheba willingly…
The Feast of Ingathering in the seventh month of the Sinaitic calendar is also called the Feast of Sukkoth, of Booths, also called Feast of Tabernacles. I have usually called it by that last phrase, and it is the most common today; but there is a problem: A tabernacle is…
When Matthew’s Gospel was first read aloud to the fledgling Christian congregations, the experience must have been like seeing the words “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” appear afresh on cinema screens in 1999. Yet, unlike The Phantom Menace, the New Testament did not disappoint. Why?…
Fragmentation and integration are phenomena which artist Makoto Fujimura feels bodily, and about which he is concerned profoundly. What do these mean for him? How may we draw his insights into this ongoing consideration—itself integrative—of integration in a fragmented world? Thus far I have been acquainting you with matters already…
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Wiker and Witt suggest that God created pandas as “comic relief” in a blessed fit of “divine whimsy.” The suggestion is troubling even for Christians who defend creation, because, being engineers, they have swallowed the reductive notion that creation must be functional. Wiker and Witt offer this rejoinder: “To spurn…
How long will monkeys typing randomly on typewriters take to produce the works of Shakespeare? That’s been a way of thinking about Darwinian evolution since who knows where. In 2002, researches at the Paignton Zoo in England decided to find out. They left a computer terminal in a cage with…
The earliest known version of “Little Red Riding Hood” comes from Egbert of Liege’s school trivium textbook Fecunda natis ( The Richly Laden Ship , c. 1022/24). Egbert’s verse version, which appears to be drawn from an oral folktale, begins with Red’s baptism: “A certain man took up a girl…
In a footnote in Fear and Trembling explaining the phrase “things do not go in the world as the preacher preaches,” Kierkegaard says, “In the old days, people said: It is too bad that things do not go in the world as the preacher preaches. Maybe the time will come,…
During the 19th century, various European states forcibly united divided churches. A similar thing happened in Zaire in 1970. Mbiti writes, “the Eglise du Christ au Zaire . . . brought together Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Disciples and a host of other Protestant traditions.” The Church of Christ became the only…
Mbiti tells a disheartening story about an effort to unite Anglicans, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Moravians in Kenya and Tanzania. At a 1965 meeting that lasted several days, the group had come to agreement on all the issues that had been seen as obstacles to union. Mbiti picks up the…
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