Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Introduction Isaiah 21 can only be understood in the light of its placement in the architecture of the second “volume” of the prophecy (chapters 13–27). The contents are arranged in twin sevenfold “columns” that represent the great bronze pillars of Solomon’s Temple: Jachin and Boaz, priest and king. The priestly…
A Biblical Reflection on the Purpose of the Constellations The starry heavens hold a place of wonder in the hearts of men. Since man’s creation we have looked up into the heavens and have beheld its glory. This is particularly true of the night sky. The stars, in their shinning…
The case for there being five discourses within the Gospel according to Matthew is a hard one to challenge: surely the closing formula “when Jesus finished these sayings” as found in 8:1, 11:1, 13:53, 19:1, and 26:1 settles it once and for all. And by the five instances of the…
The Long Commission The Great Commission of Matthew 28 has long been a cornerstone of American Evangelicalism. It has formed and fashioned the American church’s missional impulse. Yet when viewed from the wide lens of Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, the Great Commission is revealed as one of the pillars…
I am delighted to see that more and more churches in the Reformed tradition are now recognizing that all baptized children are members of the body of Christ and therefore ought to be communing with the rest of the body at the Lord’s Table. This has been decades in the…
Good leaders have always been rare. In today’s world, they seem extinct. Joe Rigney’s recent book Leadership and Emotional Sabotage digs into the spiritual reasons for the leadership epidemic and recommends cures. Rigney starts with a summary of a book by Edwin Friedman called A Failure of Nerve . Friedman’s…
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W e should, Paul Griffiths says ( Decreation , 324–5), be careful about the aesthetic judgments we make: “every human creature's formation in the discernment and delight in beauty is different, and because each of us is badly damaged with respect to our capacity to make reliable judgments about the…
As recorded in the supplement to the Summa , Thomas Aquinas teaches that the damned will rise again with bodies and will be tormented in hell corporeally. This leaves open questions about the materiality of the various biblical descriptions of those torments, and in question 97 of the supplement, Thomas…
In his Organizing Enlightenment , Chad Wellmon explains how the modern research university was a response to a crisis of “information overload.” The Enlightenment saw an explosion of new knowledge and research. The Enlightenment empire of erudition was a bookish empire. Philosophes imagined they could provide a unified account of…
If the infinite God is to be present within a finite creation, writes David Bentley Hart ( Beauty of the Infinite , 204), “the finite must . . . become ever more open, ever greater and more capacious . . . ; and creaturely mutability allows for this.” Hart is…
T he name of R.J. Rushdoony, the polymathic Reformed theologian, historian, and activist, has appeared with increasing frequency in accounts of the religious right. There is a small industry in screeds warning of the dire threat of theocracy, and Rushdoony plays the role of the father of all theocrats. It's…
The prophecy of Habakkuk closes with a lovely poem of joy in the midst of adversity and lack (Habakkuk 3:17-19). The poem opens with six lines that describe the barrenness of the land. It is a nihil-land; the Hebrew negative lo' occurs twice (“fig tree does not blossom”; “the field…
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