Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In Colossians 4:7-9, Paul tells the Colossian church that he is sending Tychicus and Onesimus to them. It is clear that they are to deliver the letter Paul has written to the church and that they are also to report to the church the details of Paul’s ministry in chains…
On the 11 th of April, 1985, the communist dictator Enver Hoxha breathed his last. It was the beginning of the end of communist Albania. After 40 years of being isolated from almost the entire world, the Albanian people started to see what life really looked like outside their borders.…
Karl Ove Knausgaard once reminisced about an author he referred to as “the man with his sweater tucked into his trousers” who, upon entering the room, would declare as if it was his creed, “I write because I am dying.” Knausgaard acknowledges this to be one reason among many why…
The Missing “It Was Good” The patterns and repetitions of Genesis 1 are well known: God speaks, it happens, and God sees that it’s good; names are given, and there’s evening and there’s morning: a day. But the patterns of creation, like the patterns throughout Scripture, are marked by variation…
And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the…
The Bible is a book about trees. We start in Eden with two trees, we end in the New Jerusalem with a single double-trunked tree, and the story hinges around the tree they nailed our Lord to. Seeing the Forest We find trees singled out on day three of creation.…
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INTRODUCTION After the Olivet Discourse, Jesus “finished all these words” (26:1; cf. 7:28; 11:1; 13:53; 19:1).  His public ministry of teaching Israel is over.  Like Moses (Deuteronomy 32:45), nothing remains for Him but to die. THE TEXT “Now it came to pass, when Jesus had finished all these sayings,  that…
Protestants agreed with Catholics that the Song elaborates a nuptial analogy to the church’s relation to Christ, but Scheper finds a significant difference between Protestants and Catholics when they explain why that analogy is apt in the first place.  Protestants, consistent with the emphasis on legal categories for justification and…
The Puritans were not prudes, but the caricature has some basis in fact. Again the Song of Songs provides a neat barometer.  Scheper juxtaposes a medieval monk’s interpretation of the “breasts” of the Song with that of two Protestant interpreters.  The results are fascinating: “the Cistercian monk Gilbert of Hoilandia does…
the Protestant commentaries almost uniformly adopt a primarily ecclesial allegory, with the tropological dimension as a valid application. But so, in fact, is the medieval tradition built on the foundation of the ecclesial interpretation, and even those commentaries devoted most strikingly to the Christsoul allegory, such as Bernard’s, recognize that…
The modern oblivion of the book has tended to blind us to the really crucial position it holds in exegetic history, not only for the question of allegory but for the central matter of the relation of divine to profane love, and in fact, as Ruth Wallerstein has said, the…
there is a certain discrepancy between the purity of these theoretical statements, polemical in context, and the actual exegetic practice of the Reformers. Moreover, the rejection of allegory and the insistence on one undivided sense hinged for the early Reformers on maintaining a radical distinction between typology and allegory. But…
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