Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Part 1 We do not understand the role of women in ministry because we do not understand the role of men in ministry. We do not understand the role of men in ministry because we do not understand the church. We do not understand the church because the consumer culture…
1. One structure The Creation account (G1:1-2:4) conspicuously conveys meaning using the literary shape of the text. The narrative is told with formulaic patterns, repetitions, and parallelism. The Garden account is different. It is viewed as a separate text, with its own author, employing its own structure. This second account’s…
I was reading James Jordan’s Creation in Six Days while also preparing for Trinity Sunday in which the gospel reading is John 3:1-15. As providence would have it Jordan dropped an easter egg for me along the lines of baptism. In chapter 5 he points out, “ On the second…
It's true. There is no verse in the New Testament that commands or records an infant baptism. This poses a problem for some Christians. Those who only look for explicit commands, or those whose theology is limited to the New Testament, will conclude that infant baptism is not biblical and…
1. Goal This paper’s goal is to identify and describe a literary strategy employed by scripture, namely using two episodes that cover similar territory or themes using details drawn from opposite ends of a number of spectrums. Once described the reader may recognize numerous other instances of this strategy in…
Numbers 14 records the tragic story of Israel’s decision to rebel against Yahweh and Moses. Twelve spies had been sent into the land to bring back a report to Israel. All twelve spies agreed: “We went to the land where you sent us. It truly flows with milk and honey”…
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A few reflections on Barth’s discussion of the Trinity in CD 1.1, ch 10. Thanks to Joshua Appel, Josh Davis, and especially Toby Sumpter who clarified several of these points. 1) Barth insists that Trinitarian theology developed not as a qualification of monotheism but as a way of defending monotheism:…
Christians are committed to the notion that the margins may be the center: We believe that a stable in Bethlehem-Judah is the site where a new humanity is born; that catacombs serve as incubator for a renewed empire; that German barbarians are the wave of future civilization; that Africans might…
(This is the weakest part.) Postmodern historiography has rightly protested against this kind of bigotry. But in the process, postmoderns have apparently jettisoned the entire idea of a universal history, if not the idea of history itself. For postmoderns, to reduce humanity to a single unit is not only intellectually…
This is much weaker, but I think the argument is still clear enough. Of course, in central respects, this proposal calls for a revival of a project that dominated Christian historical writing from Eusebius to the Enlightenment. For Christian theologians and historians, all of human history was enclosed in a…
This is the first draft ( sans footnotes) of a paper I will deliver in January. The remainder of this draft will be posted on this site. To this day, schoolchildren in Sri Lanka learn about Buddhist ?doctrine?Efrom a Buddhist Catechism first published in English and Sinhalese in 1881. Described…
One premise of the above analysis is that Islam, which conquered some of the most vibrant areas of early Christianity, was and is a judgment of God, and therefore that Christians must recognize that Islam?s rise and continuing success results from the failures of the church. Laurence E. Browne concluded…
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