Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Introduction Isaiah 21 can only be understood in the light of its placement in the architecture of the second “volume” of the prophecy (chapters 13–27). The contents are arranged in twin sevenfold “columns” that represent the great bronze pillars of Solomon’s Temple: Jachin and Boaz, priest and king. The priestly…
A Biblical Reflection on the Purpose of the Constellations The starry heavens hold a place of wonder in the hearts of men. Since man’s creation we have looked up into the heavens and have beheld its glory. This is particularly true of the night sky. The stars, in their shinning…
The case for there being five discourses within the Gospel according to Matthew is a hard one to challenge: surely the closing formula “when Jesus finished these sayings” as found in 8:1, 11:1, 13:53, 19:1, and 26:1 settles it once and for all. And by the five instances of the…
The Long Commission The Great Commission of Matthew 28 has long been a cornerstone of American Evangelicalism. It has formed and fashioned the American church’s missional impulse. Yet when viewed from the wide lens of Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, the Great Commission is revealed as one of the pillars…
I am delighted to see that more and more churches in the Reformed tradition are now recognizing that all baptized children are members of the body of Christ and therefore ought to be communing with the rest of the body at the Lord’s Table. This has been decades in the…
Good leaders have always been rare. In today’s world, they seem extinct. Joe Rigney’s recent book Leadership and Emotional Sabotage digs into the spiritual reasons for the leadership epidemic and recommends cures. Rigney starts with a summary of a book by Edwin Friedman called A Failure of Nerve . Friedman’s…
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D arren Grem's forthcoming The Blessings of Business is a study of the money men behind mid-20th century Evangelicalism. It's a revealing book, once one skims off Grem's premises, which seem to be: Evangelical ministry takes money, wealthy people provide the money. Grem seems to think this a scandal. It's…
W riting on Catholic education in a 1990 America essay , Walter Ong pushed the discussion of Catholic identity back to the roots: What is the “catholicity” of “Catholic”? “‘Catholic,'” he observed, “is commonly said to mean ‘universal,' a term from the Latin universalis .” But this doesn't fit the…
W hy isn't the Hebrew Bible taken seriously as a text of philosophy, ethics, or political thought? That it isn't is obvious. As Yoram Hazony observes in his The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture , his graduate training at Rutgers all but ignored the Bible: “political theory and the history of…
M ikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita has an epigraph from Goethe's Faust , and the novel is full of Faustian elements. Both involve temptation, the Satanic ball that Margarita attends resembles nothing so much as Faust's Walpurgis night, and the romantic overlay to a story of devilish temptation is…
I n an 1851 essay on “Catholicism” published in the Mercersburg Review , John Williamson Nevin unpacked the notion that the church is “catholic” or “universal.” He distinguished two ways of understanding the church's universality—as “all” or as “whole.” If the church is catholic as “all,” then it is an…
W hile Athenian philosophy was in many respects quite distant from the political cosmologies that characterized the great Near Eastern empires,” writes Yoram Hazony ( The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture ), “it continued to develop their view of man as being essentially a creature of the state that governs him,…
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