Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
21. Under three things the earth quakes. And under four, it cannot bear up. 22. Under a slave when he becomes king, And a fool when he is satisfied with food, 23. Under an odious woman when she gets a husband, And a maidservant when she supplants her mistress. The…
We have looked at the prima facie evidence for a short chronology in Ezra-Nehemiah, a chronology that assumes that the Artaxerxes of Ezra 7ff. and Nehemiah is in fact Darius. This month we examine the argument against the short chronology. There is only one argument, and that is that the…
The Priestly Genealogy Jeshua the high priest, who returned with Zerubbabel, was not a young man at the time. We know this because his father, Jehozadak, was taken into captivity (1 Chron. 6:15). Thus was 50 years before the decree of Cyrus (2 Kings 25:18-22, by implication). Jehozadak’s father Seraiah,…
Thomas C. Oden, After Modernity . . . What? Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990. Reviewed by Rev. Jeffrey Meyers. Reading Oden’s After Modernity . . . What? was tonic. There were passages that launched me out of my chair with a hoot to pace the office floor — of course, the…
Matthew records that Jesus "withdrew" to Galilee to begin His public ministry there after He "heard that John had been delivered up" (Mt. 4:12). Matthew’s typically matter-of-fact style veils the truly remarkable character of Jesus’ withdrawal. Matthew has been presenting Jesus as the Messiah, the Seed of Abraham and Son…
John Brown called this one of the most difficult passages in the entire epistle to the Hebrews, and Hebrews is no easy book. Several questions confront us as we read and meditate on these verses. First, in what sense did the Old Testament saints described in verses 4-38 not receive…
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I n his essay on “The End of All Things,” Kant analyzes the “pious language” that speaks of “a person who is dying as going out of time into eternity.” Kant finds no comfort in the thought. On the contrary there is “something horrifying” about it. The end of time…
E ric Gilchrest ( Revelation 21-22 in the Light of Jewish and Greco-Roman Utopianism ) suggests that the conclusion vision of Revelation would receive a quite different reaction from its original readers, depending on whether they had been schooled in Jewish or in Greco-Roman Utopian traditions. For a Jewish reader,…
T he angelic “guards” at the gates of the new Jerusalem are, argues Margaret Barker ( Revelation of Jesus Christ , 323), “probably a memory of the ancient guardians of the city known to Isaiah, ‘the watchmen set on the walls' (Isa. 62.6).” Barker claims that “These ‘watchers' are concealed…
I ‘m taking a break from blogging over the Christmas holidays. For daily seasonal musings and meditations, see the Theopolis blog .
C hristian Wiman ( My Bright Abyss , 51-2) claims that some poets—“surprisingly few”—possess “a very particular gift for making a thing at once shine forth in its ‘thingness' and ramify beyond its own dimensions.” He sites several lines from Norman MacCaig: “Straws like tame lightnings lie about the grass…
C hristian Wiman ( My Bright Abyss , 41) quotes a poem, “These Poems, She Said” by Robert Bringhurst, which Wiman says he “carried . . . in my mind like a totem.” It begins: These poems, these poems, these poems, she said, are poems with no love in them.…
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