Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Paul, a bond-servant of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which He promised beforehand through His prophets in the holy Scriptures, concerning His Son, who was born of a descendant of David according to the flesh, who was declared the Son of God…
With the surprising discovery of the Nelda Boswell scroll historians have deciphered its contents and concluded that the apostle Paul returned to the region of Galatia shortly after he wrote the letter that we call Galatians. The evidence suggests that a number of local pastors, elders, and deacons, along with…
Second Temple Judaism was a form of covenantal nomism, according to E. P. Sanders’ terminology. This means that Torah-observance was a way of expressing loyalty to the Lord of the covenant who had graciously elected Israel. I think Sanders’ view (taken up in bits and pieces and with some modifications…
We often hear that the key to Christian obedience is thankfulness for what God has done. But the Bible stresses faith and hope much more than gratitude. The Baptist pastor and author John Piper has written, “Nowhere in the Bible is gratitude connected explicitly with obedience as a motivation. We…
One of the questions that is commonly asked about Tom Wright regards his teaching about how Paul uses the term “the righteousness of God.” Since Wright’s interpretation of the term in Paul’s epistles is commonly mentioned in passing but rarely analyzed, it seems like a good idea to explicitly spell…
If God promised a certain land to the seed of Abraham, saying that it would be theirs “forever” (Gen. 13:15), why do Reformed churches teach that the Jews permanently lost their right to the land? What about all these Old Testament “forever” promises and prophesies made to the Jews? How…
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So, this is a moment of dialog with myself. I have been musing on Bakhtin and Dostoevsky, so the self-division seems appropriate. I have charged that Dostoevsky’s Christ is an ineffectual liberal Christ, using The Idiot as exhibit #1. But Diane Thompson’s essay on the biblical word in Dostoevsky’s poetics…
Milbank suggests that Berkeley makes some important breakthroughs in working out a Christian understanding of language and of a creation made by the Logos (“Theological Without Substance,” Journal of Literature and Theology 2:2 [1988]). Berkeley imagines a metaphysics without substance, but, because he believes in a God who communicates in…
In his famed “culinary triangle” (see Food and Culture: A Reader ) Claude Levi-Strauss suggested a triple classification of food: raw, cooked, and rotten. Raw is the natural state; cooked is a cultural transformation of nature, and rotten is a natural transformation. Those formed the corners of a triangle. Along…
I offer a meditation on Jesus’ entry into the silence of the grave at the Trinity House site. Click here .
Jezebel and her children are ostensibly the ones who are obsessed with the “deep things ( bathea ) of Satan” (Revelation 3:24). That fits into the letter to Thyatira in various ways. For starters, Jehu accused Jezebel of being involved in sorcery (2 Kings 9:22), and the church’s counterpart to…
David Thomson (at TNR ) thinks that Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death, and his legacy of acting, raises some fundamental questions about what we take as entertainment these days: “No movie actor has risked so much on despondency. This is not to say that every film star has been single-mindedly happy:…
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