Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In a recent article in Biblical Horizons , I argued that the imagery of James 1:21 alludes to baptism, and particularly to baptism as an ordination and incorporation into the holy priesthood. This understanding of baptism as ordination to priesthood is not, I have since discovered, original, but in fact…
He will be a priest on his throne, and the counsel of peace will be between the two of them (Zechariah 6:13b). A prime difficulty in the interpretation of this verse is the antecedent of the pronoun "them." A number of alternatives have been offered. Some suggest that the "two"…
Like certain kinds of music, the unchanging rhythm of Aquinas's Summa gets into your bones. Read a few sections and it begins to run through your head. You start drumming your fingers, humming, swaying gently to the rhythm of Videtur-Sed Contra-Responsio, Videtur-Sed Contra-Responsio, “It seems-On the contrary-I answer.” The only…
The Book of Revelation is a gold mine of liturgical information. The various hymns and exclamations in Revelation have always been used in Christian worship. As I have been studying Revelation this year, it occurred to me that make a complete hymn out of the various hymns in the book.…
In the book of Revelation we find a triad of Strong Angels, and another triad of Other Angels. The purpose of this essay is to explore the Biblical background of these two sets, and thus fill out their meaning. The first triad of angels we encounter in the Bible comes…
In Revelation, the term aggelos means messenger, of course, but with a special emphasis on messenger as covenant administrator. This is immediately obvious from the fact that the angels are constantly acting to enforce the covenant one way or another: sealing people, bringing judgment, calling for repentance, etc. They are…
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INTRODUCTION After the Olivet Discourse, Jesus “finished all these words” (26:1; cf. 7:28; 11:1; 13:53; 19:1).  His public ministry of teaching Israel is over.  Like Moses (Deuteronomy 32:45), nothing remains for Him but to die. THE TEXT “Now it came to pass, when Jesus had finished all these sayings,  that…
Protestants agreed with Catholics that the Song elaborates a nuptial analogy to the church’s relation to Christ, but Scheper finds a significant difference between Protestants and Catholics when they explain why that analogy is apt in the first place.  Protestants, consistent with the emphasis on legal categories for justification and…
The Puritans were not prudes, but the caricature has some basis in fact. Again the Song of Songs provides a neat barometer.  Scheper juxtaposes a medieval monk’s interpretation of the “breasts” of the Song with that of two Protestant interpreters.  The results are fascinating: “the Cistercian monk Gilbert of Hoilandia does…
the Protestant commentaries almost uniformly adopt a primarily ecclesial allegory, with the tropological dimension as a valid application. But so, in fact, is the medieval tradition built on the foundation of the ecclesial interpretation, and even those commentaries devoted most strikingly to the Christsoul allegory, such as Bernard’s, recognize that…
The modern oblivion of the book has tended to blind us to the really crucial position it holds in exegetic history, not only for the question of allegory but for the central matter of the relation of divine to profane love, and in fact, as Ruth Wallerstein has said, the…
there is a certain discrepancy between the purity of these theoretical statements, polemical in context, and the actual exegetic practice of the Reformers. Moreover, the rejection of allegory and the insistence on one undivided sense hinged for the early Reformers on maintaining a radical distinction between typology and allegory. But…
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