Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
John the Baptist says, “I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me . . . will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire (Mt. 3:11).” Much debate surrounds the nature of this statement and what exactly it prophesies. Sacramental, baptistic, and charismatic Christians…
First Corinthians is not considered one of the Pastoral Epistles, but there is much to learn from Paul about pastoring a congregation by the way he writes to the Corinthians. Briefly, 1 Corinthians is an exposition of the cross and resurrection. In the first fourteen chapters, Paul gives an exposition…
Fredrik Hagglund ( Isaiah 53 in the Light of Homecoming After Exile (Forschungen Zum Alten Testament) ) argues against the common notion that Isaiah 53 is about the atoning suffering of Yahweh’s Servant. The Servant’s suffering is vicarious (i.e., he suffers for the sins of others) but it is not…
With the inheritance of Canaan and the dividing up of this priestly territory among the tribes, Israel became a microcosm of the nations of the world. This division between Israel and the nations as a substitutionary “land and sea” would prevent another global rebellion, and thus another global judgment. ((For…
One of the more revealing aspects of Paul and James’ soteriology is the different ways they both use Genesis 15:6 (“And Abraham believed God and it was counted for him as righteousness,”) as a proof text to defend their comments about the gospel. The key observation to make is that…
The disintegration of the EU is not the end of the world. It is a sign that the end of the world is anything but nigh. Western culture as we know it is dying at the hands of usurpers, traitors and prodigals. Even the worst rulers throughout Christian history at…
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INTRODUCTION This section of Proverbs 11 highlights several issues. The first two verses treat issues of honesty and dishonesty; verses 3-8 describe the security of the righteous. Verses 9-14 return to various concerns regarding the use of the tongue, which was a theme of the previous chapter. HONESTY AND HUMILITY…
James C. Cobb cites revealing statistics concerning the self-identification of blacks in the South: “In 1964, only 55 percent of southern black respondents expressed ‘warm’ feelings toward southerners, as opposed to nearly 90 percent of the southern white polled. By 1976, however, the proportion of southern blacks who expressed this…
Modernism, critic Richard Lehan writes, was built on the conception that the world was caught in a conflict between organicism and mechanism, between the feminine and masculine, or, as Henry Adams put it, between the dynamo and the virgin. Modernist writers can be classified by their responses to this division:…
Leviticus 18 describes sexual sin as occasions of exposure, as “uncovering nakedness.” At times, the nakedness is not only an individual’s, but is shared. The reason given for the prohibition of maternal incest in Lev 18:8 is that the mother’s nakedness is the “father’s nakedness.” This makes sense: In the…
Patrick Henry Reardon writes concerning the use of “tradition” in the NT (2 Thes 2:15 especially): “In this respect it is important, I believe, not to interject into Paul’s formula a later controversy between the Protestants and the Council of Trent. We observe that Paul does not distinguish between ‘Scripture…
In his Triune Creator, Colin Gunton offers this “argument” against reading Gen 1 as an account of six literal days of divine activity: “the sophistication and complexity of the writings make it clear that the authors, and that includes those who wrote the books in their canonical form, exclude -…
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