Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
G.K. Chesterton assumes a surprising and memorable perspective from which to view the events of Palm Sunday (Matthew 21:1-11) The Donkey by: G.K. Chesterton When fishes flew and forests walked And figs grew upon thorn, Some moment when the moon was blood Then surely I was born. With monstrous head…
There is a common biblical principle: you must give back what you steal. In the Bible, restitution is repayment with interest. If you rob someone of their money, you have to pay back double what you stole. A thief must pay back fourfold if he steals a sheep, and if…
Identifying Isaiah’s suffering servant with the promised Messiah is unthinkable for a Jew because it combines the offices of humble priest and victorious king. While it is frustrating that Jews refuse to see the sufferings of Christ in Isaiah 53, the reluctance of Christians to interpret the passage in its…
Let everything that has breath praise the Lord! Praise the Lord! Psalm 150:6 (ESV) The command to praise God is pervasive throughout Scripture. In the verse above the Spirit calls all things with breath to praise the Lord. Song is also clearly featured all throughout Scripture and is a featured…
“Gender is a social construct.” That’s shocking to people who have assumed that gender and sex were synonyms but at least since I was in college, in the ‘80s, we were taught that “gender” refers to the forms, the customs, the traditions that our culture teaches us to define what…
In Genesis 49, Jacob prophesies about (blesses and curses?) his twelve sons. The first three of them don’t fare well. Jacob recalls Reuben’s offense of taking his concubine (Genesis 35:22) and the murderous violence of Simeon’s and Levi against the Canaanite inhabitants of the city of Shechem (Genesis 34). He…
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1 Timothy 4:13: Do not neglect the spiritual gift within you, which was bestowed upon you through prophetic utterance with the laying on of hands by the presbytery. Prior to the Reformation, the Western church treated ordination as a sacrament. Protestants have never done that. For the seven sacraments of…
Many of you received an email this week encouraging you to be at church on time and rebuking those who are habitually tardy. Some got the impression that the elders don’t want you to show up at all if you’re running late. That’s not the point. If you’re unavoidably tardy…
In response to my earlier post on “Spouse and Kingdom,” Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio writes, “it strikes me that the WCF’s dualism in describing the Church reflects the typical Western dualism that was congealing during the 17th century. Invisible and spiritual matters can be described in poetic, imaginative,…
Zizioulas locates the central difference between patristic and postmodern views of “otherness” in the way each conceives the relation of old and new. For postmodernism, “alterity involves negation, rupture, ‘leaving behind’, for patristic thought the ‘new’ relates to the ‘old’ in a positive way.” He demonstrates this by appealing to…
In his 2006 volume, Communion and Otherness , John Zizioulas pretty directly connects Western philosophy with the fall of Adam. Adam claimed to be God and thus “rejected the Other as constitutive of his being.” As a result, Self took “ontological priority over the Other,” with the result that “otherness…
The extension of rights to the Jews was one of the great achievements of the French Revolution, and Rosenstock-Huessy moves from a discussion of the resulting Jewish enthusiasm for liberalism to a digression dealing with the relation of Jews and Gentiles in history. It is titled “Alpha and Omega,” and…
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