Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In Colossians 4:7-9, Paul tells the Colossian church that he is sending Tychicus and Onesimus to them. It is clear that they are to deliver the letter Paul has written to the church and that they are also to report to the church the details of Paul’s ministry in chains…
On the 11 th of April, 1985, the communist dictator Enver Hoxha breathed his last. It was the beginning of the end of communist Albania. After 40 years of being isolated from almost the entire world, the Albanian people started to see what life really looked like outside their borders.…
Karl Ove Knausgaard once reminisced about an author he referred to as “the man with his sweater tucked into his trousers” who, upon entering the room, would declare as if it was his creed, “I write because I am dying.” Knausgaard acknowledges this to be one reason among many why…
The Missing “It Was Good” The patterns and repetitions of Genesis 1 are well known: God speaks, it happens, and God sees that it’s good; names are given, and there’s evening and there’s morning: a day. But the patterns of creation, like the patterns throughout Scripture, are marked by variation…
And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the…
The Bible is a book about trees. We start in Eden with two trees, we end in the New Jerusalem with a single double-trunked tree, and the story hinges around the tree they nailed our Lord to. Seeing the Forest We find trees singled out on day three of creation.…
Showing page 35 of 309
Showing page 2 of 43
Ancient Near Eastern texts often refer to a god abandoning his house, the temple, sometimes in outrage over the evils of the people, sometimes because the people’s time has come to an end. Whenever the god leaves, the house and the city where it’s housed is left unprotected. Enemies come…
“Beyond the visual paradigm” was the challenge issued by the organizers of the symposium that eventually produced the volume Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses , edited by Shane Butler and Alex Purves. In place of a visual paradigm, they wanted to offer a “synaesthetic reading of the ancient world” (2).…
Political histories of the Religious Right miss the underlying ferment that gave rise to the movement, argues Molly Worthen in her recent Apostles of Reason . The eruption was more fundamentally an eruption of tensions within Evangelicalism itself. Worthen argues that Evangelicals are united by three dominant questions: The reconciliation…
Isaiah uses the verb “be silent” ( chashah ) seven times. Nearly every time, it is Yahweh who is silent. He has restrained Himself until He cannot hold it in (42:14, 2x), keeping silent so long that Judah began to think they could get away with anything (57:11). For Zion’s…
Yahweh’s Servant will rejoice and won’t go silent until: A. Goes forth B. as brightness C. her [Zion’s] righteousness C’. and her salvation ( yeshu’a ) B’. as a torch A’. burns. Zion’s righteousness and rescue will be light flashing into her darkness, like the brightness ( nogah ) of…
John and Gloria Ben-Daniel argue in their The Apocalypse in the Light of the Temple that the temple serves as the “organizing principle” of John’s Apocalypse (4). The background of the book, then, is not Roman persecution of the church but “the destruction of the second Temple in AD 70…
Showing page 594 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
