Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In our first essay in this series ( part 1 ), we saw that Proverbs 30 opens with a puzzle, a cryptic sentence that challenges the reader to search out a matter in order to gain understanding. "It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, but the glory…
The story of Hezekiah’s illness and recovery is familiar to every child who has attended Sunday School. Informed that he would die, faithful King Hezekiah pleaded in tears for a longer life. God heard his prayers and saw his tears, and promised fifteen more years. As a sign that He…
1. The Blessed Hope "Looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus." Titus 2:13 I was recently asked how I as a postmillennialist would preach on "The Blessed Hope." This is often a sticky question, because postmillennialists believe that…
1. Jeroboam and Ahab After Solomon died, the people came to his son, King Rehoboam, and asked for tax relief. Rehoboam refused to give it, and indeed told the people that he was going to tax them even more severely than his father had. At that point, with the blessing…
One aspect of truth is unity. It was Truth Incarnate who prayed for the unity of His people in John 17, which certainly makes unity a priority for them as well. In one sense, we know by faith that the Church is always invisibly unified in Christ, but there is…
Mr. Paul Miller of Vancouver writes that he is not persuaded by my remarks on Luke 4 on " The Son of Joseph ." He calls attention to Mark 6:1-6, where Jesus came "to His own part of the country," taught in the synagogue, and astonished many. The people said,…
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A s recounted in From Conflict to Communion , jointly produced by the Lutheran World Federation and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, the Reformation was an academic dispute that careened into a division of the church. Apart from the first four theses, Luther's 95 Theses did not state…
D aniel Everett thinks language is a tool, and has written a book about it: Language: The Cultural Tool . He develops his theory over-against the notion that language is the product of a biological “instinct.” On this Chomskyan/Pinkerian view, “language is part of our genetic endowment and that, because…
R eflecting on Daniel Craig's recent performance as Iago, Tamsin Shaw puzzles over the “Iago problem” in a secular world: “The concept of evil has fallen out of favor in our disenchanted world. Its religious and superstitious connotations are permissible in horror movies, but otherwise often deemed embarrassing. Without some…
I n a TLS retrospective on Kipling , Michael Holroyd notes the obvious: “By the time he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907 he was well known as the private soldiers' poet, and had achieved fame for beating the drum on behalf of the British Empire. The British…
I n her TLS review of John Kerrigan's Shakespeare's Binding Language , Emma Smith calls attention to the liturgical and sacramental dimensions of Shakespearean oaths, contracts, and vows: “Binding in Measure emerges as deeply theological and sacramental (‘grounded in the Roman military oath of sacramentum,' as Kerrigan tells us in…
A delicious 1964 poem from Norman MacCaig ( Poems of Norman MacCaig , 165), entitled “The Smuggler”: Watch him when he opens his bulging words—justice, fraternity, freedom, internationalism, peace, peace, peace. Make it your custom to pay no heed to his frank look, his visas, his stamps and signatures. Make…
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