Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I grew up in the 1950s. This was before the "Sixties" and the democratization, informalization, and general cheapening of the church and her worship. Ministers were Father Donovan, Pastor Eckhart, Reverend MacPherson, Mister (Episcopal) Parker, and Brother Smith. Liturgical speech was high language, sounding kind of like the King James…
Metaphor exerts a surprisingly powerful influence within our thinking. Although it is easily dismissed as little more than a figure of speech, when we attend more closely to the ways in which we use it, metaphor’s importance swiftly becomes more apparent. Although many of our metaphors have become quite invisible…
What is a tree, scientifically speaking? A mere googling gives the following answer: “a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground.” We can increase detail by describing its family, genus, species and…
The majority of Western evangelical Christians rarely, if ever, fast as a form of spiritual discipline. In our culture, fasting is more connected with dieting than worship, the other side of our deeply ambiguous fascination with food. Food is everywhere. We eat more than ever before, at greater speed, and…
A Grammar of Creation An understanding of the visual-musical language of the Bible must begin with Genesis 1. This is fortunate, because when explaining biblical types to academics, as opposed to children, one is repeatedly forced to start from scratch. From birth, a healthy child is attuned to rhythm and…
In an inverse Eden, a land laid waste, one works alone tending the trash. There are none like him in all the earth, inquisitive, playful and most drawn to those mysterious, dancing bipedal creatures who lost earth and left it to go wandering the vast wilderness of space. Humans have…
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Stephen Finlan ( Problems With Atonement , 20-29) offers a sixfold typology of “spiritualization” of sacrifice that includes “moralizing interpretation of ritual,” “internalizing,” the use of ritual imagery for non-ritual realities, at the extreme an outright “rejection of ritual.” What he identifies as “spiritualization” is certainly present in both Jewish…
Stephen Finlan ( Problems With Atonement , 30-31) observes that “Paul not only interprets OT types, he sometimes sees the antitype in the type.” The Rock that followed Israel was not simply a pointer to Christ but was Christ. Israel already experienced baptism and enjoyed spiritual feasts in the wilderness.…
At the Trinity House site this morning, Joe Anderson and Tim Nichols argue that catholicity, like love, begins with those nearest to us.
Does everything always participate in a cosmic liturgy? Maybe. But that’s not the picture we get from Revelation 4-5. Instead, we get a progression. Initially, only the four living creatures worship (4:8), then the twenty-four elders (4:10), then both together (5:8), then myriads of angels (5:11), then everything created in…
In a 2001 article in JSNT , Russell Morton analyzes the Jewish and Hebrew-Bible background for the scene in Revelation 4-5. But this does’t explain every detail. In particular, “the acclamation of ‘worthy’ is not found in the hymns of the Hebrew Bible” but is “a typical feature of Hellenistic/Roman…
In a piece at the New York Magazine site , Matthew Hutson reviews evidence that overconfidence increases the confidence that others place in you. He cites a Berkeley study from 2012 that showed “that overconfidence increases one’s status. Subjects who overestimated their abilities at group tasks were more respected and…
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