Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The story of Judges 19 and the subsequent chapters are some of the most shocking and appalling accounts in all of Scripture. The callousness of the old host and the Levite, and the monstrous brutality of the men of Gibeah, leaves us feebly scrabbling for words by which to surmount…
David has become king. He has conquered the capital city of Jerusalem. He has brought the ark of Yahweh into the city and placed it in a tent. He has stationed Levites at the tent to offer sacrifices of praise. An anomaly hits him: He has a cedar-paneled palace, and…
In Part 2 of this series we traced what we have of the development of the epiclesis in the liturgy of the Church. In this third and final part we’ll look at the theological implications of this and how we may apply what we’ve learned. As we saw in Part…
In a 2014 piece published in First Things , I offered a "wish list" for Protestant churches, a checklist for a future catholic Protestantism. The wish list doesn't cover everything. It doesn't mention those things that Protestants, especially Evangelicals, already do, often exceedingly well, things like missions and evangelism and…
In the first part of this series we examined the meaning of “blessing” in Scripture and its parallels in Jewish liturgical tradition, but did not find anything that we could properly call an epiclesis (an invocation of the Holy Spirit). We did find examples of invocation of Jesus to “come”…
When the Aaronic priests were ordained, the blood of the ram of "filling” was placed on the lobe of the right ear, the right thumb, and the right big toe (Lev. 8:22-24). Similarly, the cleansing rite for a leper included smearing the right ear lobe, thumb, and big toe with…
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Finding God in Ancient China by Chan Kai Thong and Charlene Fu is one of a number of studies attempting to show that the ancient Chinese worshiped the God of Noah and of Israel. The authors assemble evidence from ancient writings, the Chinese language, ancient Chinese beliefs about God, and…
Alexander Dugin, the man sometimes called “Putin’s brain,” outlines a “fourth political theory” in a book of that title. Communism and Fascism have collapsed, and liberalism, the final twentieth-century ideology, turned into libertine postmodernism as soon as it triumphed. The collapse of modern ideology opens space for what modernity excluded,…
You can hear Beeson Divinity School Dean Timothy George interview me about Gratitude: An Intellectual History on the Beeson podcast .
Isaiah 63:10-14 reviews Yahweh’s history with Israel. He saved them through the “angel of His face,” lifted them up from the sea and carried them (like the daughter of Pharaoh rescuing Moses from the Nile). He put His Spirit “in the midst” ( qereb ) of Israel. But they rebelled,…
Writing at the New Yorker , Dexter Filkins argues that America’s withdrawal from Iraq left the Iraqi Prime Minister with freedom to destroy the country: “When the Americans invaded, in March, 2003, they destroyed the Iraqi state—its military, its bureaucracy, its police force, and most everything else that might hold…
James Jordan teaches the first course of Trinity House’s 2014-15 year, an August course on the book of Genesis. Click here for information and registration.
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