Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
A couple of decades ago, when I was a young Reconstructionist (instead of a middle-aged post-Reconstructionist), I coined the phrase "political polytheism" to describe how modern evangelical Christians approach matters of social law and politics. Christians want the Bible for Church and family life, but turn to other gods for…
Gary North has from time to time taken note of some of the differences between contracts and covenants. For him, one of the most important is the oath-character of a covenant. Naturally, the English terms "contract" and "covenant" can be used with varying nuances by different writers, and their zone…
The Book of Chronicles is the last book in the Hebrew Canon of the Old Testament. The word "canon" means "authoritative list" when used in connection with the Bible. What we call the Hebrew Canon consists of 24 books arranged in three major divisions: the Law, the Prophets, and the…
by: Peter Leithart and James Jordan The Book of Kings is structured chiastically, or concentrically. To see this clearly, we start in the middle and work our way outward. 2 Kings 3–7 record the central events of the ministry of Elisha. Elisha makes his first appearance in 1 Kings 19:19-21,…
(The following is a supplement to my book, God’s War Against Humanism , a study of the book of Judges, available from Biblical Horizons for $20.00 – a photocopy of the original book, which is now out of print). The turning point in the book of Judges is 8:22-28. Here…
From time to time I am asked how I think the Lord’s Supper should be done. This essay is my response to that question. To start with, we should agree that the Lord’s Supper is the only ritual we are obligated to do in the New Covenant on a routine…
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More evidence of “poesis” in Renaissance notions of human nature and “self-fashioning.” The first quotation is from Pico, and is drawn from Lewis’s English Literature in the Sixteenth Century : God’s words to Adam at creation were: “To thee, O Adam, we have given no certain habitation nor countenance of…
A couple of quotations from Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning , with a comment appended. He is talking about the changing meanings of “fashion” in the English Renaissance: “In the sixteenth century there appears to be an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of a human identity as a manipulable, artful process.…
Some fun quotations from Michel de Montaigne, taken from Stephen Toulmin’s excellent Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity : “He who wants to detach his soul, let him do it. When his body is ill, to free it from the contagion; at other times, on the contrary, let the soul…
Slavoj Zizek has this to say at the beginning of his The Puppet and the Dwarf : “One possible definition of modernity is: the social order in which religion is no longer fully integrated into and identified with a particular cultural life-form, but acquires autonomy, so that it can survive…
Joel Garver helpfully explains Derrida’s deconstruction of “presence/absence” by suggesting that Derrida is attacking a particular view that assumes absolute presence and absolute absence. Either a thing is here or it is not, we instinctively thing, but in fact in all kinds of ways absent things leave “traces” of their…
Barth has a wonderful discussion of the omnipotence of God in Dogmatics in Outline (pp 48-49). He disputes the notion of absolute power, power in itself, as a description of God’s almightiness, and concludes (in line with the tradition of God’s simplicity) that God’s power is His holiness, righteousness, mercy,…
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