Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
This newsletter summarizes everything that has been written and argued in Biblical Chronology to date. The Bible is filled with chronological information. Some would dismiss the idea that this chronological information can and should be systematized. We have to say, however, that if the scattered information about the tri-unity of…
At the Biblical Horizons Conference on Worship and Sacrifice , held 17-21 August, 1992, we explored the meaning of the five major sacrifices in considerable depth. 1 During the last, the centrality of the male lamb (the ram) in the sacrificial system was briefly discussed. I want in this essay…
As we saw last time, Uzziah became king of Judah in the 27th year of Jeroboam II, the year A.M. 3204. He reigned for 52 years. He was basically a good and devout king, but toward the end of his life he recapitulated the fall of Adam by trying to…
We have now arrived at the reign of Jeroboam II. When Jeroboam II came to the throne of Northern Israel, Amaziah was reigning in Judah. After the death of Amaziah, there was an interregnum of eleven years, during which Judah was governed by Israel. During those years, the son of…
Several years ago I wrote an essay, “Theses on Paedocommunion,” in which I argued that allowing all baptized and non-excommunicated persons to the table of the Lord was Biblical and desirable. (A copy of this essay is available for a donation from Biblical Horizons .) During the past several years…
The question of whether the Church stands “against” culture, is “of” or “above” culture, or seeks to “transform” culture cannot be answered in abstraction from a particular cultural context. To be sure, in many ways the Church’s message and relation to the world cannot change; the Church must, in season…
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Jeanne Halgren Kilde opens her When Church Became Theatre with a comparison of New Haven's First Church of Christ (built 1814) with First Baptist of Minneapolis (built 1886). There had been a shift in the exterior, from “the classical pastiche of Greek and Roman to a medieval one with Gothic…
In Psalm 80, the Psalmist is dismayed at Yahweh’s abandonment of His vine. Isaiah (Isaiah 5) laments but is not dismayed. He knows why the lover, his friend, has abandoned His vineyard-bride and now brings an indictment against her. What kind of grapes did Yahweh want? What kind of wine…
Human beings are temporal creatures, but our experience of time isn’t merely of the relentless tick-tock of clock time. Time has quality as well as duration. We can spend an hour waiting for a late bus, or we can spend an hour absorbed in a book or a lively conversation.…
In a NYT piece on a recent Galilean artifact, Isabel Kershner writes, “Experts have long believed that in the period before Herod’s Temple was destroyed in A.D. 70, synagogues were used as a general place of assembly and learning, something like a neighborhood community center. The more formal conception of…
In an essay on “Reformation” in her recent collection, The Givenness of Things , Marilynne Robinson observes that Latin remained culturally dominant in England even into the age of Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and Julian of Norwich. Latin's hegemony “did have the advantage of making the learned classes mutually intelligible across…
“The bare fact is,” says Rowan Williams ( The Edge of Words ), “that the material world speaks .” Material agents speak, “and this speech is not . . . a chance decorative addition to mechanical process, but an activity that is implicated in the entire complex of finite agency.…
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