Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In a recent article in Biblical Horizons , I argued that the imagery of James 1:21 alludes to baptism, and particularly to baptism as an ordination and incorporation into the holy priesthood. This understanding of baptism as ordination to priesthood is not, I have since discovered, original, but in fact…
He will be a priest on his throne, and the counsel of peace will be between the two of them (Zechariah 6:13b). A prime difficulty in the interpretation of this verse is the antecedent of the pronoun "them." A number of alternatives have been offered. Some suggest that the "two"…
Like certain kinds of music, the unchanging rhythm of Aquinas's Summa gets into your bones. Read a few sections and it begins to run through your head. You start drumming your fingers, humming, swaying gently to the rhythm of Videtur-Sed Contra-Responsio, Videtur-Sed Contra-Responsio, “It seems-On the contrary-I answer.” The only…
The Book of Revelation is a gold mine of liturgical information. The various hymns and exclamations in Revelation have always been used in Christian worship. As I have been studying Revelation this year, it occurred to me that make a complete hymn out of the various hymns in the book.…
In the book of Revelation we find a triad of Strong Angels, and another triad of Other Angels. The purpose of this essay is to explore the Biblical background of these two sets, and thus fill out their meaning. The first triad of angels we encounter in the Bible comes…
In Revelation, the term aggelos means messenger, of course, but with a special emphasis on messenger as covenant administrator. This is immediately obvious from the fact that the angels are constantly acting to enforce the covenant one way or another: sealing people, bringing judgment, calling for repentance, etc. They are…
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The narrative of Saul is a superb study in the psychology of envy. Saul becomes enraged at David because of David’s success in fighting his, Saul’s battles. It is utterly irrational envy, as envy always is. Saul’s envy builds to a murderous rage, as he tries twice to kill David.…
A week ago, I posted a series of quotations from James Neill’s Origins and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies . Neill shows that same-sex relations are common among animals and standard practice in many human societies. In what sense, then can we describe same-sex relations, as Paul does…
In his contribution to The Catholicity of the Reformation , Robert Jenson pencils in the contours of the communio ecclesiology that arose within Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism and has become, as he says, “a major achievement of ecumenical consensus” (1). It is a Trinitarian ecclesiology and, in Jenson’s summary, an…
I go back again and again to David Yeago’s seminal article on the “Catholic Luther” in The Catholicity of the Reformation . This time around, this passage on Luther’s early theology of the cross stood out. Yeago argues that Luther’s main question was not, “Where can I find a gracious…
Time was when the wealthy were considered the leisure classes. Nowadays, that’s not so, as the Economist reports: ‘Overall working hours have fallen over the past century. But the rich have begun to work longer hours than the poor. In 1965 men with a college degree, who tend to be…
Some of the most interesting current work being done on early modern English poetry traces connections between the poetry and the religious, especially the liturgical, conflicts of the Reformation and post-Reformation eras. Conflicts over sacraments put the medieval semiotic imagination in question, and fresh conceptions of image and sign shaped…
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