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Writing

Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.

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Masculinity

Ringing the Brothel Door

Bruce Marshall once wrote that every young man who rings the bell at a brothel is unconsciously looking for God. While it is not necessarily true that the inward desire of every man is ultimately a thirst for righteousness, it is true that every sin is the disordering of a…

by Garrett SoucyOctober 31, 2023
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Ruth

Work and Gratitude in Ruth

In a previous essay , I argued that the story which begins with Lot and culminates in Ruth’s great-grandson David follows God’s five-fold pattern of creative work as laid out by Jim Jordan: taking something in hand (in this case, the Abrahamic family), restructuring it, distributing the product of labor,…

by Josh JensenOctober 27, 2023
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Books

Men, Marriage, and the Feminine Imperative: A Review of "Men and Marriage"

Gilder, George. Men and Marriage. Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2023. 1 By 1973, the hightide of second-wave feminism had flooded the beaches of American culture. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique eroded the shores of traditional female roles by naming and stirring up further domestic discontentment. Kate Millet wrote her dissertation-turned-book,…

by Bill SmithOctober 17, 2023
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Galatians

Get Behind Me, Eliphaz!

The Book of Job is a very tortuous book. The arguments of Job and his friends are shot through with truth and error hopelessly mixed together. Every line of contentious poetry stands locked in deadly battle with every other line. As maddening as this can be for a reader who…

by Jonathan WhiteOctober 10, 2023
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Apostle Paul

Before His Conversion, Paul Knew Jesus

More than once in the last 50 years it has occurred to me that Paul might have known Jesus before He appeared to Paul on the Damascus road, but I had never taken up the notion in earnest until recently when I ran into a book by Stanley Porter titled…

by Ralph Allan SmithOctober 4, 2023
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Acts

Did Peter Found the Church in Rome?

The question in the title is genuine, not polemic. I could be perfectly happy to follow an ancient — and what is regarded as a well-attested — tradition. But I do not feel compelled to follow it simply because it is tradition. I would like to have arguments that Peter…

by Ralph Allan SmithSeptember 26, 2023

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False Prophet

The New Testament contains a number of warnings about false prophets ( pseudoprophetes ), often in “apocalyptic” contexts (Matthew 24:11, 24; Mark 13:22; 2 Peter 2:1; 1 John 4:1). The link between false prophecy and crisis goes back to Jeremiah. As the Babylonian threat against Judah rises, false prophets appear,…

April 21, 2015

Touch Not the Anointed

“Touch not my anointed, and do my prophets no harm.” That is how Psalm 105:15 summarizes the Lord's care of the patriarchs who were wanderers and strangers in the earth. “He permitted no many to oppress them, and he reproved kings for their sake” (v. 14, alluding to Genesis 12…

April 21, 2015

Passover Firstfruits

Psalm 105:36 describes the exodus as the Lord's striking of the “firstborn” of Egypt, “the firstfuits of all their vigor.” Firstborn is firstfruits: It makes obvious sense. And behind the obvious is a link between human and humus , between the fruitfulness of earth and the fruitfulness of the human…

April 21, 2015

A Triad of Trinities

Revelation 12-13 describe draconian and bestial attacks on the saints. The enemies form a triad. Indeed, they form a double triad. First, dragon, sea beast, land beast. Then: Sea beast, land beast, image of the beast. Alternatively, we can see four: Dragon, sea beast, land beast, image of the beast.…

April 20, 2015

Stabilized Passion

In his contribution to Radical Secularization , John Milbank contests Habermas's Kantian notion of public reason, arguing that reason is not “self-grounded” but “inseparable from our affective and elective intuitions concerning the nature of reality. Reason is always conjoined with feeling and can even be considered to be a reflexive…

April 20, 2015

Reckoning Time in Genesis

Jeffery Leonard ends a Review of Biblical Literature (4/15) review of BC Hodge's Revisiting the Days of Genesis with this observation: “While the author does a workmanlike job of demonstrating how various numbers in Gen 1–11 could be interpreted symbolically, it is not at all clear to me that the…

April 20, 2015

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