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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Drake notes that Burckhardt sees Constantine’s reign “exclusively in terms of a power struggle between Constantine and the bishops,” and shrewdly recognizes that this is in turn rooted in “an even older premise that the church became ‘worldly’ as a result of Constantine’s conversion and lost its spiritual purity.” That…
Was Constantine converted? Really, truly, deeply, irreversibly converted ? Not just converted, but converted converted? It depends on what “conversion” means. Arthur Darby Nock recognized that conversion has preconditions, but describes the actual event as a “chemical process” that involves the “addition of a catalytic agent” to produce a “sense…
Why celebrate Pentecost? Because the Spirit is the hovering wind that forms the formlessness, fills the void, brightens the darkness. Because the Spirit is the breath that gives Adam life. Because the Lord comes into the garden in the Spirit of the day to breathe out judgment to Adam and…
Dick Morris gives us another reason to be grateful for Obama’s election - he’s effectively muzzled and marginalized the Clintons. Hillary is Secretary of State, but Morris points out that “Obama has surrounded Hillary with his people and carved up her jurisdiction geographically. Former Sen. George Mitchell (D-Maine) is in…
William Appleman Williams’s Empire As A Way of Life is a far from perfect book, but one of the striking things is the surprisingly open way America’s founders spoke of the US as an empire. “No constitution was ever before as well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self-government.”…
Drake’s title - Constantine and the Bishops - says a lot. Instead of the usual “Constantine and the Church” or “Constantine and Christianity,” Drake’s title implies that Constantine had to deal with real actors with their own motivations, agendas, passions, some of whom are as imperious as the emperor, some…
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