Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. (1 John 1:8) O God the Father, creator of heaven and earth, Alpha and Omega, beginning and end, who inspired Creation with the breath of your nostrils, who placed Adam in the…
For nearly a half-century, Sodom has been a key symbol in the American culture wars. On the one side, we have an aggressive movement among homosexuals that has first decriminalized homosexual conduct, then to force cultural and legal recognition of homosexuals as a minority and to normalize homosexual behaviors, finally…
Speaking of the Church, Romans 11:16-17 says, "And if the root be holy, the branches are also. But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, being a wild olive were grafted in among them and became partaker with them of the root of the fatness of the…
At the end of Isaiah 61, Yahweh's Servant rejoices because the Lord clothes Him with salvation and righteousness. He decks Him like a bridegroom with a garland on His head. He wears jewels like a bride. He is a new bridegroom in a new garden of Eden, a garden of…
Before anything else, a word about “Torah” may be in order. I have been persuaded that “law” is a bad translation of “Torah,” even though it is evident that what is called “Torah” does have commandments, statutes, and ordinances in abundance. Why not “law?” “Law” as a translation for “Torah”…
Few novelists seem as innocent of the temptation to punditry as Jane Austen. Though living through a period that witnessed the birth of an independent United States, the French Revolution and the Terror, the Napoleonic wars and the rise of revolutionary romanticism, and the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution, she…
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S usan Hanssen describes Trump as an old-fashioned Whig. It's an intriguing history lesson, but I was especially taken by her conclusion. “If America is going to be rebuilt it will be rebuilt at the grassroots level, and that grassroots effort is actually going remarkably well,” Hanssen writes. What the…
I t depends on our concept of this universalism of the Christian religion whether we become narrow or broad in our ecclesiology,” wrote the Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck in an essay translated by John Bolt in the Calvin Theological Journal . How we relate grace to nature, re-creation ( herschepping…
M etaphor has had a good run for the past several decades. Philosophers, linguists, and literary theorists have renounced the reductive “classical” understanding of metaphor that treated it as an expendable adornment of the literal. Instead, we have discovered that metaphor is inherent in language itself, and even sets the…
Culture, writes David Goldman , is “inherently hostile to innovation. T.S. Eliot famously defined English culture as the regatta, the Glorious Twelfth, Wensleydale cheese, beetroot in vinegar, vestments, bishops, the music of Elgar — the minutiae of daily life accreted over generations. Culture is what does not change.” Yet there…
I srael's prophets excoriate the worship of Israel, in such terms that some commentators have concluded that they are attacking ritual as such. That cannot be, argues Dru Johnson ( Knowledge by Ritual ). Micah's answer to the question, “How shall I approach YHWH?” is not to counsel his hearers…
B oris Fishman celebrates the 50th anniversary of Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita at the NYTBR , a 50th anniversary that should be a 75th: “the author completed it in 1940, just as his own brief life was ending. But in the Soviet Union of the time—then concluding…
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