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Creation

Maker of Heaven and Earth, (Part 4)

In my previous two posts, I looked at aspects of Psalms 93, 95, 96 and 98 that declare Yahweh, the divine King, to be the world’s own Creator. In my next post, I plan to argue that the creation theology of the sub-section constituted by Psalms 93-100 contributes to the…

by Stephen LongApril 23, 2015
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Otherness

Sexual Difference, Liberal and Christian

Ethika Politika has published a fascinating interview within which the French Catholic philosopher Fabrice Hadjadj discusses his recent work on the subject of sexuality. While there are many points where our lines of reasoning as Protestants will sharply diverge from Hadjadj’s, there is also much that is deeply perceptive in…

by Alastair RobertsApril 21, 2015
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Literature

Macbeth and the Fall of Adam

For anyone in Shakespeare’s audience who knew the real story of Macbeth, his play must have been surprising. Shakespeare changed so many important details of the historical Macbeth’s life that had Raphael Holinshed, the main author of the most popular history of the British Isles in Shakespeare’s day — Holinshed…

by Ralph Allan SmithApril 16, 2015
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Creation

Maker of Heaven and Earth, (Part 3)

I started looking at a sequence of psalms on divine Kingship (Psalms 93-100) in my last post, part of a series looking at the Old Testament’s witness to Yahweh’s exercise of absolute mastery over his cosmos. I am not trying to “prove” a doctrine of creation ex nihilo directly from…

by Stephen LongApril 14, 2015
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Anxiety

(Un)Holy Fear

Most of the time I believe that dread is wise, anxiety righteous, fear a holy thing. It sounds ridiculous, but bear with me. There are days when fear seems to be not only a rational response to my circumstances, but a moral duty. After all, being a grown-up means responsibility.…

by Leta SundetApril 11, 2015
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Psalms

Psalm 36 Commentary

Get the Psalm 36 Translation here Psalm 36 begins with several translation problems. First, the first word in the actual psalm, as it is found in the English text, is the word "oracle." This word also begins the second verse in the medieval Massoretic Hebrew text, which is our basic…

by James B. JordanApril 10, 2015

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History

Hospitality

For us, hospitality usually means entertaining. It means having our friends and neighbors and church members into the home. Sometimes, in our world, it involves jockeying for position and power by showing hospitality to the right kinds of people. That’s how the rich and famous create and sustain the aura…

March 24, 2007

Obscene dancing

The London Times fulminates: “It is quite sufficient to cast one’s eyes on the voluptuous intertwining of the limbs, and close compressure of the bodies, in this dance, to see that it is far indeed removed from the modest reserve which has hitherto been considered distinctive of English females. So…

March 22, 2007

Christ and Horrors

Marilyn McCord Adams ( Christ and Horrors , Cambridge, 2006) proposes to demonstrate the coherence of Christology not by starting with sin and explaining how Christ has dealt with sin, but by starting with “horrors” and asking, What must Christ be and do if He is going to rescue us…

March 22, 2007
History

The Alexandrian West

In her book on medieval Bible scholarship, Beryl Smalley notes that “Alexandrian exegesis penetrated to the Latin middle ages, when knowledge of Greek had declined, by two main channels: indirectly through the Latin Fathers and directly through translations of Origen’s works. Rufinus’ translations of some of his homilies were used…

March 22, 2007

Allegory and empire

Philo thought of allegory as a means for universalizing Jewish history and law, analogous to the way the Roman world had fused all peoples into a single empire. Literalists are “citizens of a petty state,” while allegorists are “on the roll of citizens of a greater country, namely, this whole…

March 21, 2007

Androgynous numbers

Why did God create the world in six days? Philo said that 6 is the perfect number, both the sum and the product of its factors, which happen to be the first three integers (1, 2, 3). But there’s more: “We may say that [6] is in its nature both…

March 21, 2007

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