Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In this essay we will think about how the whole Bible is structured as one Word of God. To begin with, there is only one Bible, not two. While we divide the Bible into Old and New Testaments, that division has no more meaning than divisions into chapters and verse,…
How should one badly bruised and inadequate church relate to another? (I am not addressing the blessed possessors of absolutely perfect churches, naturally.) I believe there are three things to bear in mind. First, we must be open to the values in other Christian traditions - even Roman Catholic and…
The third and sixth day have a second creative act. Note the chiastic arrangement of the material in these special acts and the parallelism between them, see the figure below. The author arranges the description of each day as a chiasm. Each line in the chiasm is mated with a…
Now the two of them were naked, the man and his woman, and they did not sense shame (Genesis 2:25) The nakedness of Adam and Eve requires several comments. First of all, against those who think that nakedness is what God intended for humanity as a permanent estate, we have…
I’ve been reflecting on the meaning of integration, and our longing for integration in a fragmented world. I’ve been connecting my own covenant epistemology further with the thought of scientist-philosopher Michael Polanyi, artist Makoto Fujimura, and Classical Christian metaphysician D.C. Schindler. In my last post , and now in this…
Luke 13:31-33 is one of the strangest passages in the Gospel of Luke. It begins with a time note that sounds emphatic “At that very hour.” Then, we are told of Pharisees bringing a message that Herod wants to kill Jesus! In His answer, Jesus speaks of a three day…
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Israel’s priests did not inherit land. Many lived in cities and they possessed the land immediately surrounding. But they did not get a separate plot when the land was divided. Yahweh said He was their inheritance (Numbers 18:19), and He said it chiastically: A. In the land you will not…
Christoph Schwobel’s contribution to Justification in a Post-Christian Society is characteristically grand. Exploring what contribution Lutheranism can make to contemporary society, he focuses on central Lutheran concerns - promise and trust. His explanation of the grammar of promise is densely brilliant: “The central distinction between law and gospel only becomes…
Christoph Schwobel’s analysis of promising ( Justification in a Post-Christian Society ) opens out into a discussion of theology proper with a reference to Luther’s claim that God identifies Himself in Exodus 3:14 as the God who promises Himself, “so that this promise is God’s essence in relation to which…
“We have an altar, from which those who serve the tabernacle have no right to eat. For the bodies of those animals whose blood is brought into the holy place by the high priest as an offering for sin are burned outside the camp. Therefore Jesus also, that He might…
In his study of Calvin’s Company of Pastors , Scott Manetsch estimates that “just under 5 percent of all excommunications” in Geneva were imposed because of “Catholic behavior” (203). By this phrase, he refers to “instances where people voluntarily aligned themselves with some dimension of Roman Catholic faith or practice,…
Adam Smith wrote, briefly in several places, of an invisible hand that guided economic life. The work of this invisible hand was to bend self-interested actions to socially beneficent ends. As Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations : “By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry,…
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