Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
While controversies over the writings of Paul continue in various corners of the intellectual globe, the word of God given through Paul and his scribe and all of the church’s interpreters and translators over the last two millennia is still readily available to the lofty and the lowly. Paul, as…
The second in a series of studies in Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy 22:30: A man shall not take his father’s wife, and shall not uncover his father’s wing (Hebrew: kanaf ). There are a number of unusual features in this law that mark it out from the previous context, indicating that it…
The texts of Christianity have been slowly at work, under the power of the Holy Spirit for 2000 years now. If we could be magically transported back into the world of two millennia ago, modern Americans would be shocked at the cruelty of that world. There was no concern for…
The Story of the Gadarene Madman is told in all three synoptic Gospels (Matthew 8:28-34, Mark 5:1-20, Luke 8:26-37). Jesus ventures into a Gentile area when He passes over the Sea of Galilee. Upon disembarking from his boat, he is immediately met by a demon-possessed madman. Upon meeting Jesus, he…
Part 1 of a multi-part series of studies on Deuteronomy 22:30-23:8. Eric Auerbach, in his classic work on Western literature, devotes his first chapter to contrasting Homer with the Bible. Of Homer, he writes of the “need of Homeric style to leave nothing which it mentions half in darkness and…
Trinity House Fellow James B. Jordan will be a speaker at an International Conference on Biblical Symbolism that will be held in Seoul on Monday, May 27 in 2013. He will address "The Importance of Biblical Symbolism and Symbolic Interpretation of the Bible." The conference will have three other speakers…
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John Walton argues in The Lost World of Genesis 1 (114) that the Bible attributes to God things that we explain in “natural” terms. He concludes that attempting to divide causation between “divine” and “natural” causation is “essentially unbiblical.” But then he proposes what amounts to a slight variation of…
Yahweh warns that He is going to measure out the wages for those who defy him (Isaiah 65:6-7): A. I will repay to their bosom B. their iniquities and the iniquities of their fathers C. because they have turned-to-smoke D. on mountains D’. And on high places C’. have scorned…
The first table setting in the Bible is the table of showbread in the tabernacle, set with twelve loaves of bread (Exodus 40:4, 22-23). That tabernacle table sets the stage for subsequent table settings. When Israel questions whether Yahweh can set a table in the wilderness (Psalm 78:19), they are…
Hughes Oliphant Old is the dean of Reformed liturgical scholars, and he has crowned his career with the publication of a massive (900+ pages) study of Holy Communion in the Piety of the Reformed Churches . The title is significant: Old is interested in Eucharistic piety and practice as much…
Peter Sloterdijk opens his Art of Philosophy (9-10) with a summary of the “epistemic suspended animation” that philosophy has traditionally demanded from its practitioners: “My aim is to show why the idea that the thinking person has to be a kind of dead person on holiday is inseparable from the…
Evangelia Anagostou-Laoutides’s Eros and Ritual in Ancient Literature is a complex, footnote-stuffed delight. She examines three myths with erotic overtones - Atalanta, Daphnis, and Orpheus - summarizing the different presentations of the myths in early Greek (Hesiod, Greek drama), Hellenistic (Theocritus, Callimachus), and Roman (Virgil, Ovid, Propertius) literature. Along the…
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