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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According to the Muslim commentator Ibn Abbas, “after the fall, Adam and Eve fasted for forty days and Adam abstained from having sex with Eve for a hundred years.”
George Williamson argues in Longing for Myth in Germany (Chicago, 2004) that the search for a “new mythology” developed from “the postrevolutionary experience of historical rupture and religious crisis.” Nationalist writers gave a particular spin to this by calling for a “German mythology.” Originally, in the early German romantics, the…
It is widely argued today that the early German romantic movement anticipates postmodernism; the early romantics were postmoderns before their time. Frederick Beiser differs, and notes three critical differences between German romanticism and the mainstream of postmodern philosophy. First, the early romantics were Platonists “in their belief in a single…
German idealism is often seen as the completion of the subjectivization of knowledge and reality begun by Descartes. Not so, says Frederick Beiser in his massive 2002 history of German idealism (Harvard): “In fundamental respects it is more accurate to say the exact opposite: that the development of German idealism…
Jean-Luc Marion challenges the Cartesian cogito by stressing the primacy of the erotic. According to Descartes’s formula ( Ego sum res cogitans ), “it follows by omission that I am no longer supposed to love, nor to hate; or better: I am of such a sort that I have neither…
Barth argues that 18th-century rational theology was rooted in prior commitments to peaceable citizenship and morality. The dynamic goes something like this: Christianity is interpreted pragmatically - it’s about the transformation of human life; but it doesn’t work - human life isn’t transformed; there must therefore be something wrong with…
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