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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P opular cliche is that Lutherans and Anglicans are high-church, Reformed lower. Lutherans and Anglicans are sacramentally-minded, Reformed less so. Lutherans and Anglicans take liturgy serious; Reformed do not. There's reason to think this isn't right. In fact, there are reasons to think that the opposite is the case. Consider…
I n a fascinating article on “the structure of significant lives,” Norman Fiering summarizes Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy's description of the development of Freud and the psychoanalytic movement. Each involves a different sort of time, and a different “grammar”—a different verbal mood and a different declension for Freud and his followers. Like…
A ccording to John Milbank (“Politics of time”), “libertarianism insists that the future lies with the isolated ‘reflective' individual manipulating a plethora of life-choices” but also “claims that civil society is sound and that new forms of community are emerging: sport associations, women's support networks, single-issue groups, etc.” Milbank is…
A t the end of 1 Chronicles, David delivers a series of speeches to the qahal (assembly) of Israel, the officers and princes of his court and bureaucracy (on 1 Chronicles 28–29 generally, see here ). The qahal consists of the “princes” ( sar is used 6x) and warriors (…
M y youngest son, Smith, is reading through the Bible this year. He's getting bogged down in Leviticus. I tell him, Leviticus is my life. I've studied Leviticus more intensely and over a longer stretch of time than any other book of the Bible, and it's shaped by understanding of…
I n a New Yorker profile of filmmaker Kenneth Lonergan ( Manchester By the Sea ), Rebecca Mead calls attention to Lonergan's interest in depicting the lives of teens, manifest especially in his film Margaret . In Margaret , the lead character, named Lisa, not Margaret, “is, at different points,…
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