Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In the Fall 2007 issue of JBL is an essay “Jonah Read Intertextually” by Hyun Chul Paul Kim of Methodist Theological School in Delaware, Ohio. The first section of the essay points to numerous linguistic and conceptual parallels between Jonah (“Dove”) and the Noah narrative: Destruction of the earth, including…
The phone rang. “Hello, this is John Mark.” “Hi, JM. This is Simon Peter.” “Oh, hello, Mr. Rock,” said Mark. “What can I do for you?” “Well, JM” said Peter, “I’ve been very impressed by your recent essays in the New Jew Review , especially your series on David as…
The sun had set and finally the crowds had dispersed. The disciples gathered in the upper room, exhausted but joyful after preaching and teaching in many different languages all day, not to speak of seeing to the baptism of three thousand people. James bar Alphaeus put on a CD of…
There was a time, I think, when Evangelical Christianity in North America tended to be dominated by what might be (pejoratively) called a “retreatist” or even “defeatist” view of society. For various reasons, Christians believed that society was headed downhill and there was nothing the Church could do about it,…
Hebrews 11 makes it very clear that Abram (later, Abraham) exercised saving faith from the time he left his home to go wonder in Caanan. He was justified at least from the time of the call in Genesis 12.1-3 on. Yet I keep reading people who think that any appeal…
I spent the last few days at A Conversation on Denominational Renewal , which thankfully met in St. Louis. The conference was well attended, about 300 or more people. The audience was mostly PCA ministers and elders, but because it was held in St. Louis there were a good many…
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Charles Taylor's account of our Secular Age has many virtues. (The following relies on Jamie Smith's summary of Taylor in How (Not) To Be Secular ; page numbers are from Taylor.) Taylor rejects “subtraction” theories of secularization, the notion that secular life was lurking beneath the sacred surface of ritual,…
Max Weber begins his lecture on “Science as a Vocation” by noting the “meaningless” of science, a product of the notion of scientific progress that guides scientific pursuits in the modern world. “E ach of us knows,” Weber writes, “that what he has accomplished will be antiquated in ten, twenty,…
James KA Smith's You Are What You Love is an accessible, penetrating treatment of the liturgical understanding of human existence, of discipleship, and culture that Smith has been developing in a number of his recent books. In this book, he focuses on the specifics of Christian liturgy as a “technology…
Revelation 21-22 gives a vision of an adorned city. Kings bring treasures into the city, but the city isn't just a container for art objects. The city is an art object. The entire civic order is an artistic creation. If the city is an art object, then all of the…
In his summary of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age , James KA Smith observes how apologetics accommodates to the social imaginary of the secular age. Apologetic responses to secularism have too often “conceded the game; that is, the responses to this diminishment of transcendence already accede to it in important…
The vision of the heavenly city at the end of Revelation contains a major oddity: The city descends twice . There are structural reasons for this. The first vision concludes one sequence in Revelation, and the second introduces a final vision. It is the same city, but the vision gives…
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