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Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.

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Biblical Studies

Advice From a Sojourner, Part 2

In our first essay in this series ( part 1 ), we saw that Proverbs 30 opens with a puzzle, a cryptic sentence that challenges the reader to search out a matter in order to gain understanding. "It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, but the glory…

by James B. JordanOctober 26, 1989
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Isaiah

Hezekiah’s Sign

The story of Hezekiah’s illness and recovery is familiar to every child who has attended Sunday School. Informed that he would die, faithful King Hezekiah pleaded in tears for a longer life. God heard his prayers and saw his tears, and promised fifteen more years. As a sign that He…

by Peter LeithartOctober 13, 1989
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Proverbs

An Antidote for Yuppie Postmillennialism

1. The Blessed Hope "Looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus." Titus 2:13 I was recently asked how I as a postmillennialist would preach on "The Blessed Hope." This is often a sticky question, because postmillennialists believe that…

by James B. JordanAugust 26, 1989
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American Culture

Elijah’s War with Baal

1. Jeroboam and Ahab After Solomon died, the people came to his son, King Rehoboam, and asked for tax relief. Rehoboam refused to give it, and indeed told the people that he was going to tax them even more severely than his father had. At that point, with the blessing…

by James B. JordanJuly 26, 1989
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Biblical Horizons

The Love Feast

One aspect of truth is unity. It was Truth Incarnate who prayed for the unity of His people in John 17, which certainly makes unity a priority for them as well. In one sense, we know by faith that the Church is always invisibly unified in Christ, but there is…

by James B. JordanJune 16, 1989
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Biblical Studies

The Son of Joseph, Revisited

Mr. Paul Miller of Vancouver writes that he is not persuaded by my remarks on Luke 4 on " The Son of Joseph ." He calls attention to Mark 6:1-6, where Jesus came "to His own part of the country," taught in the synagogue, and astonished many. The people said,…

by James B. JordanMay 16, 1989
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Who Will Leave Us Alone?

S usan Hanssen describes Trump as an old-fashioned Whig. It's an intriguing history lesson, but I was especially taken by her conclusion. “If America is going to be rebuilt it will be rebuilt at the grassroots level, and that grassroots effort is actually going remarkably well,” Hanssen writes. What the…

June 7, 2016

Bavinck on Catholicity

I t depends on our concept of this universalism of the Christian religion whether we become narrow or broad in our ecclesiology,” wrote the Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck in an essay translated by John Bolt in the Calvin Theological Journal . How we relate grace to nature, re-creation ( herschepping…

June 6, 2016

On Classical Metaphor

M etaphor has had a good run for the past several decades. Philosophers, linguists, and literary theorists have renounced the reductive “classical” understanding of metaphor that treated it as an expendable adornment of the literal. Instead, we have discovered that metaphor is inherent in language itself, and even sets the…

June 6, 2016

Music and Risk

Culture, writes David Goldman , is “inherently hostile to innovation. T.S. Eliot famously defined English culture as the regatta, the Glorious Twelfth, Wensleydale cheese, beetroot in vinegar, vestments, bishops, the music of Elgar — the minutiae of daily life accreted over generations. Culture is what does not change.” Yet there…

June 6, 2016

Prophets and Ritual

I srael's prophets excoriate the worship of Israel, in such terms that some commentators have concluded that they are attacking ritual as such. That cannot be, argues Dru Johnson ( Knowledge by Ritual ). Micah's answer to the question, “How shall I approach YHWH?” is not to counsel his hearers…

June 3, 2016

Magical Realism, Russian Style

B oris Fishman celebrates the 50th anniversary of Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita at the NYTBR , a 50th anniversary that should be a 75th: “the author completed it in 1940, just as his own brief life was ending. But in the Soviet Union of the time—then concluding…

June 3, 2016

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