Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Inspired by the “Moscow Mood” Debate In a shocking 1961 study, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram would don an official-looking white lab coat and tell a volunteer to administer increasing shocks to another “volunteer” in an adjacent room strapped into an “electric chair” just out of sight. The shocks were incrementally…
My title and the substance of the article are borrowed from a section of David Wenham’s excellent book, Paul: Follower of Jesus or Founder of Christianity? I am appropriating ideas from the pages in his book which address the question, “Why Does Paul refer to Jesus’ Life and Ministry so…
Some of us may be familiar with the notion that the epistle of James is like a New Testament version of Proverbs or other wisdom literature. According to this line of thinking, the epistle of James (together with the other wisdom literature) is basically a collection of timeless sayings without…
This summer I started walking a long trail that ran north from our home. On my best days, I would walk a total of five miles at a brisk pace. This trail follows the power lines that serve a significant portion of North Dallas and stretches far past the two…
I am an Australian. I went to the American Academy of Religion mega-fest last year to meet up with some friends, to present a paper at a ‘science and religion’ panel, and to marvel at the sheer scale of how Americans do things. It was quite a ride. Looking at…
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 We evangelicals do not often understand the roles of men and women in ministry. Because our consumerist culture has gutted the notion of family as it was historically understood, all Biblical passages about women in church ministry (a familial organism) are almost incomprehensible to…
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Stanislas Breton ( A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul , 56-7) observes that Plato dealt with mythology not be eliminating the gods but by taking their mythical histories as metaphor of the real, “by reading the elevating density of the intelligible in the heaviness of the sensible.” Platonic dualism thus…
Stanislas Breton ( A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul , 59) observes that for Paul “Time [is] the expression or explication . . . of the eternal.” He elaborates by linking predestination with the imperative of creation to sketch out a linguistic/constructivist ontology: “Word and seed correspond to each other…
“Jews ask for signs and Greeks desire wisdom,” says Paul. Most interpretations focus on the objects: Jews are defined by signs, Greeks by wisdom. Stanislas Breton ( A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul , 143-4) is more interested in the verbs: “We have here a simple typology, limited to an…
The oath of the strong angel in Revelation 10 knits together two passages. The angel’s oath stance - hand raised - alludes back to Ezekiel 20, where Yahweh reminds Israel of the day He chose them and lifted His hand (Heb. ‘esse ’ yadi ), making Himself known to them…
John records Jesus’ ringing “It is finished” in his crucifixion narrative. But when he gets to Revelation, John records another declaration that things are “finished.” The angel who gives John the book to eat swears that “the mystery of God is finished” (Revelation 10:7). In context, the mystery of God…
In a NYRB review of an exhibition of Cubism at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Julian Bell links the early cubist experiments of Georges Braque to the impressionism of Cezanna: “In his artistic researches, Cézanne had been intent to paw at the boundary between his personal visual sensations and the…
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