Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
John 18:1-11 appears on the surface to be a straightforward, if somewhat unusual, narrative of Jesus’ arrest by officers of the chief priests and Pharisees accompanied by an apparently large group of Roman soldiers, all of them led by the betrayer, Judas. But there is much more here than what…
Why is the US embroiled in the Middle East? There are two primary answers: Oil and Israel. Both are fairly intractable problems, the latter in significant part because of the unique convergence of theology and politics that has forged American policy in the region. Dispensationalists insist that we must bless…
There’s a common theme that arises in the study of theologians James B. Jordan and Peter Leithart. It is this: Context matters. Details matter. This is God’s Word. The details are not arbitrary “filler” hiding the kernel of truth in the husk of the text. The husk and the kernel…
Perhaps the most fearful of all possibilities in the world is the possibility of betrayal on the part of someone who is in a “position of trust.” This, unfortunately, is the first block in what ought to be the foundation of every marriage in the world. Every woman has a…
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The way we talk about the world matters. Our doctrine of creation tells us that words do not simply reflect reality. They also shape it and the way we inhabit it. Among the world’s many language groups, the Church is distinct. She is called to name things with Scriptural language,…
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In John’s gospel, Jesus famously says “I am” again and again. These allude to the Old Testament’s revelation of “I am,” but if we can press the wording, they are also statements about the being of Jesus. Let’s say they are ontological statements. The predicate, though, describes Jesus’ ministry in…
There are some dreams and visions scattered around the Old Testament, but no book as the kind of concentration of dreams as Daniel. Kings dream, and the prophet dreams. In Esther too, the dream of Ahasuerus is the turning point of the story. Zechariah sees a series of visions in…
Salvian the Presbytery was not impressed with the post-Constantinian Roman empire. In his treatise on The Governance of God (translated in Writings of Salvian the Presbyter F ), he denounced the vices of the majority of believers: “The Church herself, which should be the appeaser of God in all things,…
The social vision of Paul’s “Pastoral Epistles” seems so very conservative, so Greco-Romany bourgeois. They seem far too conservative to be genuinely Pauline, according to the consensus view among critical scholars. That reading of the Pastorals is somewhat plausible if one skims the surface. Paul reinforces accepted male-female role distinctions,…
When we read Jonah, our attention is naturally focused on the fascinating character of the prophet. He disobeys and flees, only to be cast a watery grave. He learns his lesson enough to obey the next time, but he’s awfully surly at the end about the withered plant. Insofar as…
When Habakkuk complains that the Lord isn’t doing anything about the violence and flouting of the law in Israel, Yahweh responds by telling the prophet the Chaldeans are coming. That’s not much of an answer, but there’s a hint that the Chaldean forces are from Yahweh: In verse 1:8, the…
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