Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
If you’re a preacher looking for good commentaries on Ezra, you’ll struggle. Certainly to find ones that wrestle in good detail with the text. And certainly ones that don’t cost you an arm and a leg. There’s a good bit more for Nehemiah, which is odd, as the two are…
Quick thought experiment: try to pretend you’ve never read 1 John before. Read 1:1-6. Go ahead; I’ll wait. Now, on to v. 7: “But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with ______….” What word would you expect in that blank, based…
In my work as a Bible translator, I was recently checking our translation team’s draft of Genesis 8:8, which says of Noah (translating the Hebrew quite literally): And he sent out the dove from with him to see: had the waters lessened from upon the face of the ground? Part…
Just in case a reader may not know Weinberg, he is a theoretical physicist and the winner of the Nobel prize in physics in 1979, as well as countless other prizes for his research. He is also a prolific, lucid, and captivating writer. If you want to read something on…
Colossians 1:15-20 is a famous passage in Paul’s epistles because it is a succinct and powerful poem. It appears even to have been a hymn. Given the uniquely Pauline language — “reconciliation” is a term used only by Paul — it should not seem odd to attribute the poem/hymn to…
Stalker (1979) is a film by Andrei Tarkovsky based on Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers. It shows a day from the life of a stalker, a man who enters the so-called "Zone", an Alien landing site, where he leads people to a room that grants people’s innermost desires, which…
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In a 2011 JBL article, Kyle Harper examines the usage of the Greek word porneia from its classical uses through the New Testament and into the early church. He hopes to specify its meaning, since the usual English translation as “sexual immorality” is “so vague” that it “inevitable threatens to…
In his contribution to Purity and the Forming of Religious Traditions , Philippe Borgeaud explores ancient comparative anthropology, the ways in which Greeks used other cultures as “mirrors.” Along the way (269-70), he discusses Porphyry’s De Abstinentia , which he compares to Mary Douglas’s classic Purity and Danger . For…
Sketching a theological account in support of Reformed ressourcement in their Reformed Catholicity , Michael Allen and Scott Swain appeal to the argument of Reinhold Hutter’s Suffering Divine Things . Hutter tries to avoid both a notion of “strict continuation” between the church and the incarnate Christ and a Barthian…
Robert Louis Wilken, noted church historian and Chairman of the Board of the Institute on Religion and Public Life, will deliver the second annual Nevin Lectures on February 20-21, at the Hodges Chapel of the Beeson Divinity School, Birmingham, Alabama. Wilken will give three lectures on “The Catholic Roots of…
In his study of Justification in Earlier Medieval Theology , Charles Carlson concludes that early medieval commentators on Paul did not give any special attention to justification. For most of the early scholastics, “justification” was a synonym for the remission of sins, and prior to the thirteenth century it was…
Ancient Babylonian temples were busy places. There were butchers and cooks for the meat, bakers for the bread and brewers of beer. The temple was supplied by farmers and milkmen, fishermen, oxherds, orchard keepers. Some were specialists in setting the table of the god, and others artisans who work with…
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