Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Jonah is Paul’s typological opposite. Indeed, in the whole Old Testament, it would be difficult to find a more perfect foil to Paul than Jonah. Whereas Paul crosses the sea to enact God’s saving purposes for the Gentiles, Jonah crosses the sea to avoid bringing Gentiles God’s mercy. For that…
Years ago, I realized that if my children wanted to feel like their house was a home, I needed to be intentional about making our physical shelter a place of spiritual refuge. I began to see the Holy Spirit as the indwelling person of the Trinity—the one who makes His…
When the crowds encircle Christ in Solomon’s Porch during the Festival of Dedication, they charge him: “tell us boldly who you are!” 1 They do not draw-up to him to with excited anticipation as they did earlier in the Gospel, 2 instead they flank him like a gang of wolves.…
1 In Deuteronomy 7:1-5, Moses wrote: When Yahweh your God brings you into the land which you go to possess, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations…
Every Advent witnesses the gruesome reanimation of the voice that whispers “you know , Christmas is just a pagan holiday…” with that sort of conversational ellipsis that does not so much invite further reflection but halts and forecloses it. The claims are several and equally spurious: Jesus wasn’t born on…
Abraham's life in Genesis is a series of trials. He travels hundreds of miles from his family into a new land, flees from a famine into the hands of a king who takes his wife, and after returning, has to rescue his brother from a war. He's involved with two…
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WHC Frend ( Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church (Stories of Faith & Fame) , 18-19) explains some of the remarkable resemblances between the account of the martyrs of Lyons (177) and the accounts of Maccabean martyrs: “The most obvious point of contact between the two is the identification…
Celsus, the opponent of Origen, believed in martyrdom: “If you happen to be a worshipper of God and someone commands you either to act blasphemously or to say some other disgraceful thing, you ought not to put any trust in him at all. Rather than this you must remain firm…
Philo waxes Virgillian in his celebration of Augustus’ victory at Actium (31 B.C.): “European and Asian nations from the ends of the earth had risen up and were engaged in grim warfare, fighting with armies and fleets on every land and sea, so that almost the whole human race would…
Reflecting on the Haustafeln in Ephesians 4-5, John Paul observes ( Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology Of The Body , 474-5) that Paul’s instructions overlap with customary family advice in the Greco-Roman world. More important than detailed differences is the fact that Paul places marriage and family…
It is difficult to overestimate the impact that Peter Leithart had on my formation as a student and a fledgling scholar. When I first arrived in Dr. Leithart’s classroom, I was largely unprepared to approach theological and biblical texts with the sort of patience and precision that they deserved. Throughout…
A student, Leta Sundet, gave a presentation today about gratitude in Isak Dinesen’s story, Babette’s Feast . One of the things that hit home was the fact that the disaffected members of the little religious community are reconciled when by a bodily act - by beginning to use their taste…
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