Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The preceding essay has caused me to consider the possibility that the life of Abraham as recounted in Genesis contains a typological prophecy of the history of Israel; that is, that the events in Abraham’s life broadly anticipate events in Israel’s history. This kind of pattern is seen in the…
by: Jeff Meyers and James Jordan In the fifth chapter of John’s gospel we read of a man who had been ill for 38 years and who was lying by a pool located by the Sheep Gate of Jerusalem. This sheep waited, as did many other infirm people, for an…
What had been reduced to ruin by this sex, would by the selfsame sex be recovered to salvation. As Eve believed the serpent, so Mary believed the angel. The delinquency which the one occasioned by believing, the other by believing effaced. —Tertullian What is Paul saying about women and salvation…
Back in Biblical Horizons 132 I discussed the horrible abuse of the converted men of Salem/Shechem in Genesis 34. These Hivites had joined the covenant by circumcision and then were slaughtered by Simeon and Levi. That, however, is not the end of their story. In Joshua 9 we find the…
Genesis 14:14 says that Abram mustered his trained men, “born in his house,” to rescue Lot, and gives their number as 318. It is clear that the precise number is provided for some reason, but what is it? S. Gevirtz notes that 318 is the sum of all the prime…
Simon Peter went up, and drew the net to land, full of large fish, a hundred and fifty-three; and although there were so many, the net was not torn. (John 21:11) This is one of those texts in the Bible that many people puzzle over. It is not a puzzle…
Showing page 241 of 309
Showing page 2 of 43
Judaism and Christianity are often contrasted as an opposition between “ritualistic” and “nonritualistic” systems. Howard Eilberg-Schwartz ( The Savage in Judaism , 140) argues that this is a mistake. The real difference is a difference of “root metaphor.” This is partly a difference between the pastoral/agricultural setting of Israel’s imaginative…
Tercio Bretanha Junker’s Prophetic Liturgy has much to commend it. Junker aims to show how the church is trained for “prophetic praxis” through the liturgy. Liturgy “should facilitate the community’s awareness of its biblical foundations, the Christian historical trajectory, a consciousness of its cultural unity, and attentiveness to the transformative…
Stepan Trofimovich, the vain Francophone liberal in Dostoevsky’s Demons , claims to know the gospels well from reading Renan, but in fact hasn’t read the Bible itself in a long time. During an illness, he comes to see himself as the liar he is and asks Sophia to read the…
Jesus comes like a thief to the unsuspecting, the sleepy (Revelation 3:3). That doesn’t simply mean that His coming is a surprise. It means that He comes to take. That’s what thieves do. To prevent this, the angel of the church at Sardis has to “keep” ( tereo ) or…
George Pattison’s closing essay in Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition explores the similarities between Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky. It’s been common to read both as “prophets revealing to `modern man’ the abyssal freedom, the wild frontiers and the midnight cries that threaten both the rational system-building of philosophers and social engineers…
In her contribution to Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition , Diane Thompson offers a brilliant analysis of Marmeladov’s speech to Raskolnikov at the beginning of Crime and Punishment . Everything he says is seasoned with grandiloquent references to the gospels, and especially to the Passion and last judgment narratives. He…
Showing page 650 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
