Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
WHAT IS THE OT PRECURSOR OF THE NT OFFICE OF PASTOR? HOW DOES THE FORMER ILLUMINATE THE LATTER? The first problem to address is: how do we know that there is an office of pastor in the New Testament? 1 Perhaps the way the question is put may permit me…
[This essay was originally published in December, 1981, in The Biblical Educator , a publication of the Institute for Christian Economics, and again with slight revisions in Contra Mundum 7 (Spring, 1993). It is reprinted here as a supplement to my book Creation in Six Days .] In 1979, Dr.…
Anyone seeking to reverse the meaning of this promise needs to come to grips not only with the phrase "God was with the lad" later on, but also with Hagar’s response in 16:13. She worships Yahweh, putting her trust in Him and obeying Him. In fact, Hagar is at the…
Ishmael is the narrator of Melville’s fantasy-romance Moby Dick. Melville takes up the traditional view of Ishmael as a wayward son of Abraham, driven out solely because of the Divine "caprice" of election, an angry man with his hand raised against all other men. He is a fitting "anti-hero," or…
There were five cities at the center of the Canaanite culture in the circle of the Jordan, a place like the Garden of Eden, like the land of Egypt, before it became the Dead Sea at the destruction of the cities (Genesis 13:10). Genesis 14:2 tells us their names: Sodom,…
Meditations by James B. Jordan Genesis 19, the destruction of Sodom and the rescue of Lot, is part two of a story that begins in Genesis 18. These two chapters happen in one 24-hour period: noon and evening in Mamre, and midnight and daybreak in Sodom. God and two angels…
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Christians founded universities in medieval Europe. They were Christian institutions, but no one (to my knowledge) sat down to work out an explicitly Christian model of education before starting a university. Universities were Christians instinctively rather than self-consciously. Dittos for many of the other Christian institutions that arose during the…
At the Trinity House site , Pastor Rich Bledsoe compares Protestant-Catholic conflicts to family quarrels, and argues that Protestants need to enter an adult relationship with the Catholic church.
One of Danah Boyd’s points in It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens is that teens have much less freedom of movement than teens of the past, and so are nudged toward virtual rather than face-to-face relations. As Alissa Quart sums it up in her NYTBR review: “In her…
Carl Trueman posted Rusty Reno’s barroom analysis of the Biola panel on the future of Protestantism. He writes in part: “Both of us, in a sense, see an epochal change taking place in American Christianity. As far as conservative Protestantism is concerned, I connect this to the collapse of traditional…
Writing at Slate , William Saletan says that “There will always be Christians, Muslims, and Jews who condemn homosexuality. There will be bigots, bashers, and demagogues. And in some places, particularly in Africa and Asia, there will be persecution and oppressive laws. But in this country, religious resistance is crumbling.…
In the wilderness, Israel eats they know not what, which they call “manna,” “What is it?” The Old Testament describes it as being like something flakey ( chaspas ) like frost ( kafor ; Exodus 16:14). Alternatively it is like bedellium ( bedolach ; Numbers 11:7), which doesn’t seem like…
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