Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Bruce Marshall once wrote that every young man who rings the bell at a brothel is unconsciously looking for God. While it is not necessarily true that the inward desire of every man is ultimately a thirst for righteousness, it is true that every sin is the disordering of a…
In a previous essay , I argued that the story which begins with Lot and culminates in Ruth’s great-grandson David follows God’s five-fold pattern of creative work as laid out by Jim Jordan: taking something in hand (in this case, the Abrahamic family), restructuring it, distributing the product of labor,…
Gilder, George. Men and Marriage. Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2023. 1 By 1973, the hightide of second-wave feminism had flooded the beaches of American culture. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique eroded the shores of traditional female roles by naming and stirring up further domestic discontentment. Kate Millet wrote her dissertation-turned-book,…
The Book of Job is a very tortuous book. The arguments of Job and his friends are shot through with truth and error hopelessly mixed together. Every line of contentious poetry stands locked in deadly battle with every other line. As maddening as this can be for a reader who…
More than once in the last 50 years it has occurred to me that Paul might have known Jesus before He appeared to Paul on the Damascus road, but I had never taken up the notion in earnest until recently when I ran into a book by Stanley Porter titled…
The question in the title is genuine, not polemic. I could be perfectly happy to follow an ancient — and what is regarded as a well-attested — tradition. But I do not feel compelled to follow it simply because it is tradition. I would like to have arguments that Peter…
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Two groups rush away from Jesus' empty tomb. Both of them have news. The women came to the tomb looking for Jesus, but now they have heard the angel’s announcement that Jesus is risen, and obey the angel’s command to go to the disciples and announce the resurrection to them.…
So Kobe's done, going out in grand style with 60 points as he led the Lakers to a comeback win. Few sports stars go out with as much fanfare, or do as well in playing up to the hype. But the debate about Kobe's greatness will continue, and his last…
America has a unique architecture, indebted to our unique religious makeup. In a 1982 article, Thomas Beeby notes that the communal experiments of early Puritans, and later of Quakers, Shakers, Moravians, and Pietists provided “paradigms of puritanical Protestant architectural thought” (essay reprinted in The Religious Imagination in Modern and Contemporary…
Patrick Gray's Paul as a Problem in History and Culture is a wide-ranging study of anti-Paulinism. Biblical scholars are familiar with anti-Paulists who charge that Paul betrayed the message and life of Jesus when he founded Christianity. But the attacks on Paul are ancient and medieval as well as modern,…
In his forthcoming, massive Reformations , Carlos M.N. Eire summarizes the conflicts between Philippists and Gnesio-Lutherans following Luther's death in 1546. Eire writes, “The most pressing issue in 1548 concerned how much accommodation to Catholicism any Lutheran should be willing to make. Melanchthon's response to the Augsburg Interim . .…
The genealogy of the priestly tribe of Levi (1 Chronicles 6) stands at the chiastic center of the genealogies of 1 Chronicles. At the beginning of that tribal genealogy is a list of the descendants of Aaron the first high priest, framed by references to the three sons of Levi…
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