Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Why there is more to Jephthah than meets than eye It was not that long ago that I realized the Jephthah-story and the Jesus-story were basically the same story. Sounds crazy, I know. But here is a one-paragraph synopsis of both: The people of God have gone their own way,…
G.K. Chesterton famously said that the Gospels don’t reveal Jesus’ mirth. It’s true we never catch Jesus laughing. But can we believe He never did? I don’t think so. Laughter is human, and Jesus was fully human. Jesus promised that those who mourned would laugh. He mourned; would He not…
Matthew 2 has all the elements of an exodus story. There’s a murderous king, who slaughters Jewish babies. There’s a infant who will be Israel’s future deliverer, saved from the murderous king so He can later return to save His people and lead them to the Promised land. There’s an…
The calendar of Israel was primarily theological, centered on commemorating the salvific acts of God, but also agricultural, celebrating the creation-restoring effects of those salvific acts. The feasts of the first month celebrated the reviving of the world in the Spring, and typified the cutting off of the Savior in…
The chiastic shape corresponds to the shape of human life. This should not surprise us, because we are made in the image of God, and God is manifest in Word and Spirit. If we are living epistles, our lives will look a bit like the literary shape of the books…
Back in January, Venkatesh Rao wrote a fascinating post on the Ribbonfarm blog, discussing different forms of models of narrative. Engaging with Ursula LeGuin’s talk ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ , Rao explores her contrast between the (male) ‘hero narrative’ and the (female) ‘carrier-bag story’, and suggests a third…
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In Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre , Girard admits that Hegel’s analysis of the master/slave relationship, especially as mediated through Kojeve’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit (which emphasizes the role of desire), helped shape his understanding of mimetic desire and…
Steven Smith, who teaches law at the University of San Diego, explains how rhetorical appeals to “equality” obscure rather than illuminate public debate. Citing a Harvard Law Review article by Peter Westen (“The Empty Idea of Equality”), he observes that everyone is for equality if it is defined as “like…
Janowski ( The Suffering Servant: Isaiah 53 in Jewish and Christian Sources ) traces modern doubts about vicarious substitution back to Kant, who argues that guilt, being an “intrinsic personal feature” cannot be transferred. Guilt is not like a financial debt, which can be paid by someone else, but, Kant…
In his superb essay in The Suffering Servant: Isaiah 53 in Jewish and Christian Sources , Bernd Janowski argues for a “place-taking” interpretation of Isaiah 53. The Servant takes the place of the people to bear their sins. Along the way, he notes some important nuances of the passage, especially…
Jesus’ death delivers not just from the curse of the law but from the bondage of law itself. Because of Jesus’ death, those in Christ are no longer “under the law.” How does that work? In Jesus - God and Man , Pannenberg offers the following explanation. Jesus was charged…
In his contribution to The Words of the Wise are like Goads (Eisenbrauns, 2013), Russell L. Meek explores the intertextual connections between Ecclesiastes and Genesis. He shows that: “(1) Qohelet relies on the language used to describe the Garden of Eden to describe his own building projects; (2) Qohelet borrows…
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