Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Over the past few days, quite the event has developed at Asbury University down in Wilmore, Kentucky. University students have appeared at the Hughes Auditorium to worship and sing praises to God, which has continued for over 90 hours at the time of this writing. There is recent reporting that…
It is well-enough known that Nero was emperor from AD 54 when he was just 16 until his death as a young man of 30 in AD 68, just 14 years later. Paul ministered during most of those 14 years (we are not sure which year he died), accomplishing 3…
When the apostle Paul says, “For me to live is Christ!” (Philippians 1:21), we do not find it difficult to understand. Paul had been a faithful servant of Christ from the time that Christ confronted him on the road to Damascus (AD 30) and through Ananias told Paul that he…
I think there’s a layer to the Song of Songs which has been largely unexamined. The Song is about Christ and his church, Yahweh and Israel, the nature of the marriage covenant, and the marriage of the couple in the Song. But while the Song is “of Solomon” (or to…
In Philippians 1:12-13, Paul informs his beloved brothers in Philippi that his Roman imprisonment — which one would naturally think hindered his ministry and the preaching of the Gospel — actually resulted in the surprising and wonderful progress of the Gospel. Of course, from our perspective 2000 years later and…
In a recent post , I explored the threefold order of creation—heavens, earth, and sea—and suggested that in Genesis 1 God stamps heaven’s order, his own threefold nature, on the creation, giving earth a trinitarian shape. So what happens to the three-level architecture of creation after Genesis 1? We don’t…
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Apringius Latin Commentaries on Revelation (Ancient Christian Texts) , 25-6) offers a fascinating numerological interpretation of Jesus’ declaration that He is Alpha and Omega. The numerical value of Omega is 800, and so is the Greek word peristera , “dove.” Alpha adds a 1 to this, and thus Jesus’ self-description…
From Irenaeus on, the vast majority of patristic and medieval commentators have claimed that Revelation was written during the reign of Domitian in the mid-90s AD. There have been a few dissidents, the most famous of which was Epiphanius of Salamis (fifth century), who may reflect an independent tradition in…
Julianus Pomerius, who directed a school in sixth-century Gaul, emphasized straightforward, unadorned preaching. “A teacher of the Church should not parade an elaborate style,” he writes in his The Contemplative Life , “lest he seem not to want to edify the Church of God but to reveal what great learning…
With my views on baptism again subject to scrutiny, I take a moment to summarize what I’ve written on the subject. There is nothing new here. It is what I wrote in my dissertation, The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism , in my book, The Baptized Body…
As Stephen recounts the history of Israel to his persecutors, he refers in passing to several chronological details. Abraham’s descendants were slaves for 400 years (Acts 7:6), God appeared to Moses after 40 years of sojourn in Midian (7:30), and another 40 years passed with Israel in the wilderness (7:36).…
In a 2006 article in Studies in Philology , Sean Benson explores Shakespeare’s use of hawking imagery in romantic relations. Shakespeare “employs the gendered discourse of hawking language in order to make the interspecific leap from the falconer’s training of his female hawk to a husband’s training of his wife.…
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