Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Theophanic revelation is historically progressive, or eschatological, in character. First of all, in Genesis 1:2, the Spirit appeared inside the creation, sent by the Father. After the creation of man, the Spirit worked and works with humanity to bring us to maturity, from Daughter to Bride to fruitful Mother. He…
On the eighth day of the rite of "filling the hand," Aaron began his service at the altar. His first offering was a "calf" (Heb. `egel ), which served as a purification offering for himself and (apparently) his household (Leviticus 9:2, 8). This is striking for a couple of reasons.…
One of the distinctive items of the high priest’s clothing was the "golden plate" inscribed with the words "Holy to Yahweh" (Exodus 28:36-38). The word translated as "plate" is tsits , which literally means "flower." The verbal and noun forms are both used in Numbers 17:8, which describes Aaron’s rod…
The square, rectangle, and cross shapes appear all over the sanctuaries God reveals in the Bible: Tabernacle, Solomon’s Temple, Ezekiel’s Temple, New Jerusalem. One thing that can be said right away about these designs, and the occasional perfect circle (the lavers), is that they do not occur in nature. They…
"For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea-monster, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (Matthew 12:40). Some reflections on Jonah’s Big Fish have led to the following essay. Let me…
Citing Melchizedek in Genesis 14:18-20, James Jordan has written that "the name of God in use among the nations was God Most High’" (Hebrew, `el `elyon ; in Through New Eyes , p. 176). In addition to Melchizedek, one could cite the example of Balaam, who invokes the Lord both…
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In his introduction to Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age , James KA Smith sums up Taylor’s argument that the Reformation hastened the “disenchantment” of the world ( How (Not) To Be Secular , 38-9). Taylor’s summary of Calvin sounds like a summary of Barth: “The Reformers ‘all see the reigning…
John P. Burgess of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary spent a year with his family in Russia and recounts the experience of Russian Orthodoxy in his 2013 Encounters with Orthodoxy . It’s a very personal, sympathetic account. He describes Orthodox practices, and also some theology, in a way that I suspect an…
Willem van Asselt’s Introduction to Reformed Scholasticism provides a superb overview of the history of Reformed Scholasticism, as well as a survey of the current state of the literature. Early on, he emphasizes the “catholicity” of Reformed Scholasticism: “those who practiced it explicitly aimed to stand within the tradition of…
Benjamin Kaplan’s Divided By Faith is primarily a revisionist history of the rise of toleration in early modern Europe. He challenges the Enlightenment notion that 18th-century intellectuals introduced the idea, showing instead that toleration appeared first as a set of practices in religiously diverse regions of Europe and was first…
Lifts might not have changed everything, but they changed a lot, according to Andreas Berard’s Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator . The TLS reviewer observes how the elevator transformed architecture, and the class distribution of vertical space: “The lift allowed the dramatic recalibration of building types. Staircases were…
How did religion survive and revive in China? Answering that question in Religion in China , Fenggang Yang sketches the outlines of a political-economic sociology of religion. Like many sociologists of religion, he rejects the theory of secularization. Modernity has not proven to be the solvent of religious faith that…
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