Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Part 1 We do not understand the role of women in ministry because we do not understand the role of men in ministry. We do not understand the role of men in ministry because we do not understand the church. We do not understand the church because the consumer culture…
1. One structure The Creation account (G1:1-2:4) conspicuously conveys meaning using the literary shape of the text. The narrative is told with formulaic patterns, repetitions, and parallelism. The Garden account is different. It is viewed as a separate text, with its own author, employing its own structure. This second account’s…
I was reading James Jordan’s Creation in Six Days while also preparing for Trinity Sunday in which the gospel reading is John 3:1-15. As providence would have it Jordan dropped an easter egg for me along the lines of baptism. In chapter 5 he points out, “ On the second…
It's true. There is no verse in the New Testament that commands or records an infant baptism. This poses a problem for some Christians. Those who only look for explicit commands, or those whose theology is limited to the New Testament, will conclude that infant baptism is not biblical and…
1. Goal This paper’s goal is to identify and describe a literary strategy employed by scripture, namely using two episodes that cover similar territory or themes using details drawn from opposite ends of a number of spectrums. Once described the reader may recognize numerous other instances of this strategy in…
Numbers 14 records the tragic story of Israel’s decision to rebel against Yahweh and Moses. Twelve spies had been sent into the land to bring back a report to Israel. All twelve spies agreed: “We went to the land where you sent us. It truly flows with milk and honey”…
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In Numbers 12, Miriam and Aaron object to Moses’ Cushite wife. Miriam becomes leprous, is excluded from the camp, and restored on the eighth day. That is to say: The Messiah’s Jewish sister objects to the Gentile bride, and is cast out of the camp, but then she is cleansed…
Hicks again: He organizes his discussion of the New Covenant fulfillment of the sacrificial system in the phrases “life surrendered,” “life transformed,” and “life shared.” Reconciliation is made on the basis of life surrendered, blood shed, but that’s not the end point of the reconciling sacrifice. This enables him to…
FCN Hicks writes in his 1946 book on sacrifice that the burning of an animal on the altar was not destructive but transforming: “The offering is not destroyed but transformed, sublimated, etherealised, so that it can ascend in smoke to the heaven above, to the dwelling-place of God.” He cites…
Only God, Augustine argues in his treatise on music, acts on rational souls directly, “per seipsum.” Human beings operate on one another’s souls through intervening bodies, that is, through the words and other signs. God has arranged the world this way, he says, as a check on human ambition and…
Many translators and interpreters of Augustine’s de doctrina Christiana translate “signa data” as “conventional signs.” But there’s something to be said for taking the phrase literally (as some commentators do). The difference between naturalia and data, Augustine says, is that the latter occur by the will of a sign-user while…
Shakespeare recognized that something new was in the offing, but the actual situation of England and Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was far more complicated that Timon of Athens suggests. The gift-society to which Timon is attached was not being completely replaced, nor was the market the main…
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