Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
After Elijah’s battered and depressed howling in the wilderness it must have seemed like the new prophet came eating and drinking. Which is a pattern we see again in the New Testament—John is explicitly identified with Elijah (Luke 1.17, Matthew 11.14), howling the truth in the wilderness that the people…
Reading Robert Conquest’s biography of Stalin 1 has opened new lines of meditation on Paul’s command in Colossians 3:9. But before turning to that, let me briefly indicate what Paul is not saying. He is not saying that there is no such thing as righteous deception, such as Jael practiced…
You won’t find wild lions today in Israel. But lions used to range much more widely than they do now, and in biblical times they were a menace that shepherds in Israel had to contend with. David did as a shepherd boy, and Amos—who “ was among the sheepbreeders of…
I would like to remedy a flaw for English speakers in the book of Genesis. A flaw that may seem innocuous, but we must remember where the devil lives...in the details. If we are to fear the Lord, it behooves our translation committees to ensure that the fearfulness of God…
While reading at my son’s baseball game this week, a mom from our school approached me and asked if I was reading Dante. I wasn’t, but our sons are both reading Divine Comedy in their sophomore literature class, so it was a reasonable question. What unfolded was a quick conversation…
In the first two essays in this series, I addressed the question of how the nations would learn about Israel’s Torah, in the second essay especially emphasizing the aesthetic aspects of Israel’s testimony. For we naturally wonder: How would people in Mesopotamia or Egypt, not to mention the rest of…
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Typology was a traditional method of reading Scripture, one that persisted into the Victorian age. Most obviously, this took the traditional form of finding shadowy figures of Christ in Old Testament characters and institutions and promises. J.C. Ryle, a leading Evangelical Anglican, claimed that one “golden chain” runs through the…
Philosophers sometimes restrict “knowledge” to verifiable facts, logical inferences, statements, theories. In fact, knowing goes on all the time, in many modes and manners. As Esther Meek puts it, our lives are a tapestry of acts of knowing. Our knowing is nestled within God’s knowing. Our acts of knowing occur…
You are my witnesses, the Lord tells Israel. You will be my witnesses, Jesus tells the apostles before His ascension. All Christians are witnesses, "martyrs" in the original sense of the word. All Christians are also called to be "martyrs" in the more developed sense: We are all called to…
Brian Stanley ( Christianity in the Twentieth Century ) is aware that the "Bible is the fountainhead of all Christian traditions," perennially central to the church's life. But he suggests that "the twentieth century may have a better claim than any other to be labeled the century of the Bible"…
Modern epistemology operates, Charles Taylor argues ( A Secular Age ); he covers some of the same ground in Retrieving Realism ), within a "closed world system" (CWS). CWS describes the various "ways of restricting our grasp of things which are not recognized as such" (551). When one operates within…
The horsemen who are summoned by the living creatures in Revelation 6 are known as “horsemen of the Apocalypse." This is what they are, technically, since they are horsemen and they appear in a book called “the Apocalypse of Jesus Christ.” But usually that phrase implies something more: these horsemen,…
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