Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
We've all heard it, too often to count. The Apostle Paul was a misgynistic homophobic pro-slavery authoritarian, probably a repressed homosexual himself, the first Puritan - Puritan here defined as "someone who cannot sleep if someone in the world is having fun." To call this a caricature is too generous.…
Some of our forefathers believed in reading/singing the psalms in order. Today, when the psalms are even used at all, they tend to be used randomly, though sometimes tied to a church calendar or to the pastor’s sermon. The Bible does not bind us to any particular practice, but there…
". . . and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they were drinking from a spiritual rock that followed them; and the rock was Christ" (1 Corinthians 10:4). Paul’s passing comment about the rock that followed the Israelites in the wilderness has often been treated as a bit of…
The story of Hezekiah’s illness and recovery is familiar to every child who has attended Sunday School. Informed that he would die, faithful King Hezekiah pleaded in tears for a longer life. God heard his prayers and saw his tears, and promised fifteen more years. As a sign that He…
When viewed as an allegory of biblical history, the controversial third act of Danny Boyle’s gripping sci-fi adventure is transformed from an illogical divergence into a blinding revelation. The following analysis contains spoilers for the movie “Sunshine.” The Creation Week is the elementary type that orders everything God has said…
In my last post , I told you the story of my current desire to understand philosopher D.C. Schindler’s metaphysical work. With this post, I start in to the venture. I begin by reflecting on what it is to be a thing. This matter always makes me laugh, and makes…
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In John’s gospel, Jesus famously says “I am” again and again. These allude to the Old Testament’s revelation of “I am,” but if we can press the wording, they are also statements about the being of Jesus. Let’s say they are ontological statements. The predicate, though, describes Jesus’ ministry in…
There are some dreams and visions scattered around the Old Testament, but no book as the kind of concentration of dreams as Daniel. Kings dream, and the prophet dreams. In Esther too, the dream of Ahasuerus is the turning point of the story. Zechariah sees a series of visions in…
Salvian the Presbytery was not impressed with the post-Constantinian Roman empire. In his treatise on The Governance of God (translated in Writings of Salvian the Presbyter F ), he denounced the vices of the majority of believers: “The Church herself, which should be the appeaser of God in all things,…
The social vision of Paul’s “Pastoral Epistles” seems so very conservative, so Greco-Romany bourgeois. They seem far too conservative to be genuinely Pauline, according to the consensus view among critical scholars. That reading of the Pastorals is somewhat plausible if one skims the surface. Paul reinforces accepted male-female role distinctions,…
When we read Jonah, our attention is naturally focused on the fascinating character of the prophet. He disobeys and flees, only to be cast a watery grave. He learns his lesson enough to obey the next time, but he’s awfully surly at the end about the withered plant. Insofar as…
When Habakkuk complains that the Lord isn’t doing anything about the violence and flouting of the law in Israel, Yahweh responds by telling the prophet the Chaldeans are coming. That’s not much of an answer, but there’s a hint that the Chaldean forces are from Yahweh: In verse 1:8, the…
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