Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
WHAT IS THE OT PRECURSOR OF THE NT OFFICE OF PASTOR? HOW DOES THE FORMER ILLUMINATE THE LATTER? The first problem to address is: how do we know that there is an office of pastor in the New Testament? 1 Perhaps the way the question is put may permit me…
[This essay was originally published in December, 1981, in The Biblical Educator , a publication of the Institute for Christian Economics, and again with slight revisions in Contra Mundum 7 (Spring, 1993). It is reprinted here as a supplement to my book Creation in Six Days .] In 1979, Dr.…
Anyone seeking to reverse the meaning of this promise needs to come to grips not only with the phrase "God was with the lad" later on, but also with Hagar’s response in 16:13. She worships Yahweh, putting her trust in Him and obeying Him. In fact, Hagar is at the…
Ishmael is the narrator of Melville’s fantasy-romance Moby Dick. Melville takes up the traditional view of Ishmael as a wayward son of Abraham, driven out solely because of the Divine "caprice" of election, an angry man with his hand raised against all other men. He is a fitting "anti-hero," or…
There were five cities at the center of the Canaanite culture in the circle of the Jordan, a place like the Garden of Eden, like the land of Egypt, before it became the Dead Sea at the destruction of the cities (Genesis 13:10). Genesis 14:2 tells us their names: Sodom,…
Meditations by James B. Jordan Genesis 19, the destruction of Sodom and the rescue of Lot, is part two of a story that begins in Genesis 18. These two chapters happen in one 24-hour period: noon and evening in Mamre, and midnight and daybreak in Sodom. God and two angels…
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The point of Trinitarian theology is not simply that there are three instead of one. We can’t just plug our pre-conceptions about God into the Trinity, and say that now we are Trinitarian. We can’t assume Deism, the idea that God is a watchmaker who leaves the world to run…
. He There is often a gap between the popular perception of a philosopher’s teaching and his own conception of his teaching. But the gap in Berkeley’s case is particularly wide. On the one hand, there is his own professed plan to justify common sense and combat skepticism. He reiterates…
Joyce's Ulysses has a pendulum structure. JH Raleigh (in an essay in Joyce's Ulysses , 102) points out the contrast of filius and mater as these are the poles around which the action is organized: “solitary and single vs conjoined, both licitly and illicitly; homeless rover vs statonary huswife (husey);…
Paul begins the substance of the letter to the Ephesians by “blessing” God (1:3). As is well known, in Greek, verses 3-14 form a single long sentence, with one verb, “Blessed” (v. 3). This reflects a form of Jewish prayer, called the Berekah. It is not a request for God…
In his The Invention of Christian Discourse , Vernon Robbins explains how and why Christian discourse and rhetoric diverged from classical models. Ryan Leif Hanson summarizes the argument in Silence and Praise : “Classical rhetoric understands the basic social reality of persons as based in the Graeco-Roman urban environment. In…
Marilynne Robinson is a theological anomaly. A self-confessed Calvinist, admirer of Calvin and Edwards, defender of original sin and predestination (which, she says right, is not determinism), she is also a self-described liberal Christian who tends to take predictably liberal positions on moral and political question and to use sneering…
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