Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In a recent article in Biblical Horizons , I argued that the imagery of James 1:21 alludes to baptism, and particularly to baptism as an ordination and incorporation into the holy priesthood. This understanding of baptism as ordination to priesthood is not, I have since discovered, original, but in fact…
He will be a priest on his throne, and the counsel of peace will be between the two of them (Zechariah 6:13b). A prime difficulty in the interpretation of this verse is the antecedent of the pronoun "them." A number of alternatives have been offered. Some suggest that the "two"…
Like certain kinds of music, the unchanging rhythm of Aquinas's Summa gets into your bones. Read a few sections and it begins to run through your head. You start drumming your fingers, humming, swaying gently to the rhythm of Videtur-Sed Contra-Responsio, Videtur-Sed Contra-Responsio, “It seems-On the contrary-I answer.” The only…
The Book of Revelation is a gold mine of liturgical information. The various hymns and exclamations in Revelation have always been used in Christian worship. As I have been studying Revelation this year, it occurred to me that make a complete hymn out of the various hymns in the book.…
In the book of Revelation we find a triad of Strong Angels, and another triad of Other Angels. The purpose of this essay is to explore the Biblical background of these two sets, and thus fill out their meaning. The first triad of angels we encounter in the Bible comes…
In Revelation, the term aggelos means messenger, of course, but with a special emphasis on messenger as covenant administrator. This is immediately obvious from the fact that the angels are constantly acting to enforce the covenant one way or another: sealing people, bringing judgment, calling for repentance, etc. They are…
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Inevitably, after an event like the Biola panel on the future of Protestantism, one wakes up thinking of the things one should have said. Here are a few. 1) One thing I did say that I need to reiterate: It seems that the three participants meant different things when we…
William Logan’s Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure is incisive, full of juicy assaults like these: “Mary Oliver is the poet laureate of the self-help biz and the human-potential movement. She has stripped down the poetry in Red Bird until it is nothing but a naked set of values: that the human…
Daniel Albright observes in his Panaesthetics that Renaissance perspective “is more unnatural, even seditious to nature, than it first appears” (49). The reason is that “Perspective is less concerned with objects than with space - it lavishes its resources on relations, not on things. In some Renaissance paintings, the thing…
Brad Gregory ( Unintended Reformation ) emphasizes the role of Christian division in the formation of modern institutions and ideologies. But he also shows at several points that the modern efforts to head off the unintended consequences of the Reformation failed or even made the disease worse. Natural law was…
According to John Thiel’s analysis in Senses of Tradition (154), innovation in the church often seems initially to be a threat to tradition: “The ecclesial investment in constancy often leads to the eclipse of the ‘still’ of the present and the ‘will be’ of the future by the ‘always’ of…
In an earlier post , I noted that Revelation 4 describes not only a heavenly temple but a heavenly court. But the judgment isn’t passed until chapter 20, when the saints have taken thrones to share in the proceedings. The beasts have already been throne into the lake of fire…
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