Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Creationism is debated widely in the US, especially when it comes to teaching creation as an alternative theory of origins in public schools. Every few months, there’s another poll showing that many Americans still believe Ussher’s claim that the world was created around 4000 BC, which always elicits a contemptuous…
Walker Percy died in 1990, but his six published novels and his collections of essays are more relevant than when he wrote them. Percy was an American Dostoevsky, and that was no accident. “The European novels,” he says in a 1974 interview, “are more philosophical, more novels of ideas.” Dostoevsky,…
The Spirit is God’s agent for renewing the creation, for restoring bonds between nations, for knitting together people into the body of Christ. The Spirit is the renewer of the world, and the bond of all relations. That means that if you want your family to be knit together, if…
In their basic physical sense , the verbs translated as "persecute" in the Bible mean “chase” or “pursue,” and that fits the context quite naturally. As Pharaoh “pursued” (LXX, dioko ; Heb. radaph ) Israel into the wilderness, for example, so the dragon chases the woman back to her place…
Seng-Kong Tan’s Fullness Received and Returned is a densely argued, thoroughly researched, contextually sensitive study of participation in the soteriology of Jonathan Edwards. Along the way, Tan deals with many of the central themes in Edwards’s theology. As with many recent studies of Edwards, Tan’s monograph demonstrates both Edwards’s creativity…
The title of James Joyce’s first novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man indicates that it is a bildungsroman , a story of formation that describes the formative experiences of a poet who aspires to artistic greatness. The education described is Joyce’s own. The novel recounts the failing…
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Brown makes the interesting observation that the phrase at the end of 1 John 5:8 is not “the three are one” but “the three are into one” (Greek, eis to hen ). Spirit, water, and blood are not quite a united witness but three witnesses tending toward one end, one…
Raymond Brown helpfully observes, “For the Christian the life-giving moment of the Spirit was not simply the descent of the Spirit upon Jesus in the form of a dove, but the Spirit flowing from within Jesus after his death. And the flowing blood, the sign of the sacrificial victim, showed…
Spirit and water are the agents of the first creation. Jesus doesn’t come that way. He doesn’t come by water only. Neither did renewal under the law. Cleansing came by water baths and also by shedding and distributing blood. Neither does the church. It doesn’t grow by water only, but…
John appeals to three witnesses in 1 John 5:6-8: Spirit, water, blood. These are all witnesses at the Exodus - the Spirit-cloud that leads Israel through the wilderness, the water of the sea, the blood of Passover. Among other things, these three witnesses testify that Jesus is the greater Moses,…
An addendum to an earlier post on Rosenstock-Huessy’s essay, “The Metabolism of Science.” Though he sees world, nature, and physis as identical in some ways, he also distinguishes them. We have different experiences of the external world, and there are summarized in the Anglo-Saxon “world,” the Latin “nature,” and the…
1 Chronicles 6:31-38 traces the genealogy of Levite singers backwards from those appointed by David to Jacob. There are some interesting names along the way. Heman the singer’s grandpappy was Samuel son of Elkanah, whom you may remember from 1 Samuel. Further back, Samuel’s great, great . . . .grandpappy…
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