Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Christmas is a joyful season, but for many it turns into something else. Instead of joy, it is full of disappointment and unhappiness. Instead of an occasion for family fellowship, it becomes an opportunity for opening old wounds, reigniting old arguments, giving new life to rancor that should have died…
The Temple of Time The “covenant-literary matrix” of the Bible is not a pattern imposed upon the text, but the internal logic of its arrangement. This fundamental structure, functioning at multiple levels simultaneously, is a ceaseless reiteration of God’s primary theme. It is an algorithm forged in the furnace of…
In the four hundred and eightieth year after the Exodus, Solomon began to build the temple of the Lord in Jerusalem. [1] That the author of Kings should date the start of the building of the temple from the Exodus is noteworthy. In Exodus 15:17, in Moses’ song following the…
Philip Schaff, a German Reformed theologian, states in The Principle of Protestantism that the material principle of Protestantism is “the doctrine of the justification of the sinner before God by the merit of Christ alone through faith.” This is the core message of the Church which leads “to the abandonment…
“Religion” is an attempt to create or build a tower with a top, or to build a temple that is self-contained. The story of The Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 is the story of mankind’s attempt to create a world that is self-contained and does not need God. All…
In the first essay in this series, I presented a case for dating Matthew before AD 70, contrary to the present scholarly consensus. In this essay, I intend to present cultural, personal, ecclesiological, and theological arguments for a very early date for Matthew. [1] The cultural argument concerns literacy in…
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Uche Anizor writes to thank me for my review of his recent Kings and Priests , and to correct some misstatements. First, I complained in my review that he didn’t give attention to the role of the pastor as lead priest-king-reader in a community of readers. In fact., he does.…
In February 2013, I predicted that the GOP would buckle on gay marriage. It was an easy, unoriginal prediction, and the evidence continues to pile up. Chris Geidner reports at BuzzFeed : “Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker — one of the Republicans often discussed as a potential 2016 presidential nominee —…
Sam Wells ends his appreciative Christian Century review of Rowan Williams’s Faith in the Public Square with this incisive comment: “The task is not simply to expose the inadequacy of a world without God or to show the collaborative spirit of religious engagement in the common good. It surely must…
Christopher Beeley’s Leading God’s People is a pastoral guide drawn whose wisdom is drawn from the great pastoral theologians of the early church. In an opening chapter on leadership in the church, Beeley observes that early pastors complained about being pulled here and there from their primary tasks - “preaching,…
In a comment on the description of Cyrus as a “shepherd” in Isaiah 44:24-45-7, John Goldingay ( The Theology of the Book of Isaiah , 66-7) observes that “in Old Testament times, ‘shepherd’ was a recognizable way to describe the role of a king. A shepherd is in charge of…
In her study of Eucharist and the Poetic Imagination in Early Modern England , Sophie Read observes that since Donne never wrote directly on the sacramental debates of the Reformation era, his view has to be “reconstructed . . . from its rhetorical trace” (86). Puns provide one source. A…
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