Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I believe hymnals should be shorter than they are. Much shorter. 100 hymns at most, let’s say. I imagine that this will be a hard one to swallow for most of my readers, so I will attempt to bolster my argument as best I can. I can’t think of any…
Joshua is never called a king in the Bible. Yet while lacking the title, Joshua possesses the trappings of biblical kingship to a degree that it seems warranted to consider him a royal figure. There are lots of reasons for thinking this. In a 1981 Journal of Biblical Literature article,…
God speaks. He is not silent. He has designed humanity for reception of such communication and also to speak on His behalf. This speaking is not simply happenstance. It is not just a curious quirk about humanity. It is intrinsic to who we are that we speak and shape the…
One evening, years ago, home from college for Christmas break, I dreamt that I was playing the piano, passionately and well, in the church sanctuary beneath the parsonage in the renovated mansion in rural New Hampshire where my father was the minister. It was something of a lucid dream because…
I’m a big worrier. Always have been. Some of my earliest memories are of being anxious to the point of getting sick, sometimes for trivial reasons. My mind moves a million miles a minute, wondering what will happen in 5 minutes, or tomorrow, or next week, or in ten years.…
“The sun had gone up on the earth when Lot came to Zoar. And the LORD rained on Sodom and on Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the LORD from heaven, and he devastated those cities and the whole valley and all those dwelling in the cities and the growth of…
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Paul Griffiths ( Decreation ) ably defends a minority position in the history of theology, namely, that angels are not bodiless, though they are “immaterial.” They are “living creatures with discarnate bodies of energy” (125). To defend this point, he offers this brilliant little analysis of the meaning of “matter”…
The final sequence of Revelation begins with the fourth “in Spirit” vision of John (21:9-10). From that point to the end of the book, the “Lamb” is mentioned 7 times (21:9, 14, 22, 23, 27; 22:1, 3). The Lamb is entering His Sabbath, the wedding feast with His Bridal city.…
Elijah's life history tracks closely with that of Moses. When he appears on the scene, he curses Israel with drought, then flees the land (1 Kings 17). Like Moses after he killed the Egyptian, he goes out from his people and lives among Gentiles. (Elijah's sojourn in Zarephath also linked…
When the seventh trumpet blows, heaven opens and the ark of the covenant appears (Revelation 11:19). We're in the Most Holy Place. Before the ark-throne are two heavenly signs - a laboring woman and a dragon. It's Zechariah 3, with Satan and the priest Joshua before the throne, Satan accusing.…
Following a long tradition, Paul Griffiths says that creatures who come from nothing are constantly inclined to return to the nihil . We “remain uneasily in being, hovering over the void from which we came” ( Decreation , 142). Venerable as this is, it's misconceived. For starters we can ask…
As Andrei Zorin argues in a TLS piece this week, Tolstoy intended to defy novelistic convention in writing War and Peace . His book was not a novel, and Tolstoy refused the easy resolutions of the novel genre. Zorin agrees that there is something to this: “In one of the…
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