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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Charles Simic laments the decline of educational standards: “An educated, well-informed population, the kind that a functioning democracy requires, would be difficult to lie to, and could not be led by the nose by the various vested interests running amok in this country. Most of our politicians and their political…
Critical scholarship has made hash of Leviticus. Scholars try to understand the rituals of “P” and “H” without much consideration of the narrative of division, death-sleep, and union that is the creation of Eve. Even the story of Abraham and Isaac is often put to the side as an irrelevancy,…
Darrin Belousek argues in Atonement, Justice, and Peace that “penal substitution is inadequate to explain the textual evidence concerning the several rituals of atonement-making” (177). He’s right. Sin offerings were done in cases where sin is not at issue. Following Jacob Milgrom and others, he points out that the rites…
In his Trinity House lectures on liturgical theology, Jeff Meyers called attention to the anti-liturgy of Genesis 3. Yahweh shows up in glory, meets Adam and Eve, gives a little sermon, kills animals to make skin tunics. The finale is not happy: Adam and Eve are excluded from the garden.…
When the Lamb appears in heaven, the angels begin singing a new song (Revelation 5:9). What’s new about it? Why a new song? The phrase “new song” is used six times in Psalms (33:3; 40:3; 96:1; 98:1; 144:9; 149:1), and once in Isaiah (42:10). The position of these Psalms in…
Austin Stewart of Iowa State may have designed a way to fool chickens into believing they are free range. “Second Livestock” offers “a free-range world wherein chickens stuck in tiny cages in factories would be able to, at least mentally, live out their lives wandering an endless field.” We have…
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