Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The Paradosis Center at John Brown University in Siloam Spring, Arkansas, put on its first conference last week, it was a remarkable event. It was an ecumenical conference including Orthodox (John Behr, Edith Humphrey, others), Catholic (Rusty Reno, Michael Root, others), and Evangelical (Timothy George, David Lyle Jeffrey). Unusually for…
Naphtali Meshel observes in his new The "Grammar" of Sacrifice that scholars have been talking for decades about the "grammatical" character of ritual and sacrifice in general, but have never actually analyzed a specific ritual or sacrificial system grammatically. Some even talk about a "universal grammar" of sacrifice "even though…
Some Christians are rather breezy about the problem of evil. We shouldn't be. Do I need to remind you of the grisly beheadings that have taken place over the past few weeks? Do I need to remind you of the blood of innocents that’s been spilled in our own country?…
Have you ever been to a wedding where the heavens opened and a voice declared the couple “husband and wife”? Few of us have. Beautiful as they are, most marriages are quite mundane. Yet when Jesus talks about marriage, He describes it as something that God does: “What God has…
Jesus is the last and greatest of the Prophets. He is the Prophet that Moses predicted (Deuteronomy 18). That means He gives the final word, brings the blueprints for the final temple, speaks the final world into existence, and has complete and permanent access to the divine court, where He…
Paul stands against those who are “troubling” or “disturbing” the Galatians churches ( tarasso ; 1:7; also in 5:10). The reference seems to be two great troublers from the Old Testament. First, Achan is described as a “troubler” for the problems he causes in the aftermath of the battle at…
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her bandanna blue through the cattails by the pond in the green pasture in the pond morning clouds and sun flecks of moonlight like fireflies ?E the ripples of the pond across her chair shafts of sunlight through the lace curtain
Trinity Reformed Church is large enough that it is difficult to know everyone in the church. And now we have been around long enough that it is awkward and embarrassing for us to meet each other. When you introduce yourself and say something like ?Are you visiting??Ethe response might well…
Leviticus 22:10-16 In the sermon today, I addressed the some of the challenges and temptations of young adulthood, the priestly stage of life. It is biblically appropriate, as I tried to show, to describe young adulthood in these terms. But we should not let this perspective obscure the more fundamental…
Lee Harris has some fascinating comments on how the liberal West constructed the Islamic threat in his recent book, Civilization and Its Enemies . Harris points out that the early modern state developed in a kind of Darwinian political world, where only the powerful states could survive. A state was…
Freedman comments, “It may be pure coincidence that the Book of Genesis begins with the words beresit . . . elohim , ‘In the beginning, . . . God . . . ,’ while the book of Ezra-Nehemiah ends with the words elohay letoba , ‘ . . . my…
David Noel Freedman suggests in his book on the unity of the Hebrew Bible a reason for the repetition of the decree of Cyrus at the end of 2 Chron and the beginning of Ezra. He points to certain manuscripts in which Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah enclose the Writings: Chronicles at…
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