Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Jonah is Paul’s typological opposite. Indeed, in the whole Old Testament, it would be difficult to find a more perfect foil to Paul than Jonah. Whereas Paul crosses the sea to enact God’s saving purposes for the Gentiles, Jonah crosses the sea to avoid bringing Gentiles God’s mercy. For that…
Years ago, I realized that if my children wanted to feel like their house was a home, I needed to be intentional about making our physical shelter a place of spiritual refuge. I began to see the Holy Spirit as the indwelling person of the Trinity—the one who makes His…
When the crowds encircle Christ in Solomon’s Porch during the Festival of Dedication, they charge him: “tell us boldly who you are!” 1 They do not draw-up to him to with excited anticipation as they did earlier in the Gospel, 2 instead they flank him like a gang of wolves.…
1 In Deuteronomy 7:1-5, Moses wrote: When Yahweh your God brings you into the land which you go to possess, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations…
Every Advent witnesses the gruesome reanimation of the voice that whispers “you know , Christmas is just a pagan holiday…” with that sort of conversational ellipsis that does not so much invite further reflection but halts and forecloses it. The claims are several and equally spurious: Jesus wasn’t born on…
Abraham's life in Genesis is a series of trials. He travels hundreds of miles from his family into a new land, flees from a famine into the hands of a king who takes his wife, and after returning, has to rescue his brother from a war. He's involved with two…
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In his TLS review of Kathryn Walls’s study of the symbolism of Una in Spenser’s Faerie Queene ( God’s Only Daughter ), Bart van Es compares Walls’s book to that of John Dixon, a sixteenth century farmer who annotated his copy of Spenser: “Like Dixon, Walls takes the Bible and…
When John enters heaven (Revelation 4), He sees the Enthronement as a precious stone, a stone glowing with light, a stone that sparkles like a star, and He is surrounded with a rainbow that is also described as a precious stone. Specifically, the stone is the emerald. This is the…
In his Caused to Believe , William Bonney follows up suggestions from Charles Giblin regarding the structure of John’s prologue and the structural connections between the prologue and the gospel. Giblin finds what he calls an X-Y pattern in the prologue: “The X of this pattern encompasses verses 1–13. The…
In the latest issue of the International Journal of Systematic Theology , the redoubtable and hyper-productive Matthew Levering probes Augustine’s arguments (in de Trinitate ) for concluding that the Spirit is “love” and “gift.” As Levering points out, the identifications are not straightforwardly asserted anywhere in Scripture, yet Augustine makes…
God’s throne in heaven, like Sinai, flashes with lightning, crashes with thunder (Revelation 4:5). Those throne phenomena are repeated at crucial seams in the book of Revelation, with additions. After the seventh seal, an angel throws fire to earth, which reproduces the heavenly throne on earth (8:5)—thunder, sounds, lightning, with…
Christians walk into church through a door. All of them can come in. There’s no restricted access. Inside, there’s a lectern with a Bible, a table with food, a pastor in white. In some churches, the aroma of incense fills the air. It’s the holy place; in fact, the most…
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