Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Christmas is a joyful season, but for many it turns into something else. Instead of joy, it is full of disappointment and unhappiness. Instead of an occasion for family fellowship, it becomes an opportunity for opening old wounds, reigniting old arguments, giving new life to rancor that should have died…
The Temple of Time The “covenant-literary matrix” of the Bible is not a pattern imposed upon the text, but the internal logic of its arrangement. This fundamental structure, functioning at multiple levels simultaneously, is a ceaseless reiteration of God’s primary theme. It is an algorithm forged in the furnace of…
In the four hundred and eightieth year after the Exodus, Solomon began to build the temple of the Lord in Jerusalem. [1] That the author of Kings should date the start of the building of the temple from the Exodus is noteworthy. In Exodus 15:17, in Moses’ song following the…
Philip Schaff, a German Reformed theologian, states in The Principle of Protestantism that the material principle of Protestantism is “the doctrine of the justification of the sinner before God by the merit of Christ alone through faith.” This is the core message of the Church which leads “to the abandonment…
“Religion” is an attempt to create or build a tower with a top, or to build a temple that is self-contained. The story of The Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 is the story of mankind’s attempt to create a world that is self-contained and does not need God. All…
In the first essay in this series, I presented a case for dating Matthew before AD 70, contrary to the present scholarly consensus. In this essay, I intend to present cultural, personal, ecclesiological, and theological arguments for a very early date for Matthew. [1] The cultural argument concerns literacy in…
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James Jordan has suggested that the vision of new Jerusalem (Revelation 21:9-22:5) is arranged as a chiastic recasting of the creation week: A. Day 1: Light in the city, 21:10-11 B. Day 2: Boundaries and measurements of the city, 21:12-17 C. Day 3: Materials of the city, 21:18-21 D. Day…
The verb “show” ( deiknuo ) occurs eight times in Revelation, and the eight uses fall into a neat pattern. Twice at the beginning (1:1; 4:1) and twice at the end (22:6, 8), the verb is used with a generic object. God shows “things which must shortly take place” (1:1;…
In an essay on “barriers and bridges” in American religion, Stephen Warner emphasizes the role of music in building bridges, forging solidarity without requiring assent to a common set of propositions. He offers a florilegium of quotations from various scholars: “At an emotional level, there is something ‘deeper' about hearing…
William H. McNeill's Keeping Together in Time explores the role of “emotional bonding through rhythmic muscular movement” in history (52). The significance of the phenomenon occurred to him during military training in 1941: “A sense of pervasive movement in unison is what I recall; more specifically, strange sense of personal…
The final chapter of the Bible (Revelation 22:6-21) is a rapid series of speeches and dialogues, structured in fourfold parallelism. Each new section introduces a new speaker or speech with some form of “he said.” The speakers move from an angel to Jesus to the Spirit and bride. The chapter…
In a 2007 Bibliotheca Sacra article, Mark Hitchcock examines various theories about the identity of the seven heads of the beast in Revelation 17:9-11. It's been proposed that the number seven is purely symbolic of fulness, and that the heads are not to be identified with any historical characters. Hitchcock's…
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