Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The Paradosis Center at John Brown University in Siloam Spring, Arkansas, put on its first conference last week, it was a remarkable event. It was an ecumenical conference including Orthodox (John Behr, Edith Humphrey, others), Catholic (Rusty Reno, Michael Root, others), and Evangelical (Timothy George, David Lyle Jeffrey). Unusually for…
Naphtali Meshel observes in his new The "Grammar" of Sacrifice that scholars have been talking for decades about the "grammatical" character of ritual and sacrifice in general, but have never actually analyzed a specific ritual or sacrificial system grammatically. Some even talk about a "universal grammar" of sacrifice "even though…
Some Christians are rather breezy about the problem of evil. We shouldn't be. Do I need to remind you of the grisly beheadings that have taken place over the past few weeks? Do I need to remind you of the blood of innocents that’s been spilled in our own country?…
Have you ever been to a wedding where the heavens opened and a voice declared the couple “husband and wife”? Few of us have. Beautiful as they are, most marriages are quite mundane. Yet when Jesus talks about marriage, He describes it as something that God does: “What God has…
Jesus is the last and greatest of the Prophets. He is the Prophet that Moses predicted (Deuteronomy 18). That means He gives the final word, brings the blueprints for the final temple, speaks the final world into existence, and has complete and permanent access to the divine court, where He…
Paul stands against those who are “troubling” or “disturbing” the Galatians churches ( tarasso ; 1:7; also in 5:10). The reference seems to be two great troublers from the Old Testament. First, Achan is described as a “troubler” for the problems he causes in the aftermath of the battle at…
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Wittgenstein, Jamie Smith argues, “relativizes the claims of logic without simply rejecting them.” He rejects not logic but “logical foundationalism” that takes logic as an “ideal language” that functions as “the norm for all languages” ( Who’s Afraid of Relativism? 58). It’s possible to see logic as such an ideal…
Jamie Smith ( Who’s Afraid of Relativism? ) defends Richard Rorty against the charge that he leaves behind an antirealism that implies we cannot refer to the world, perhaps an antirealism that denies the existence of extra-linguistic things. In Smith’s summary, “realist critics confuse having a theory of reference and…
Drawing from Pindar’s seventh Olympian Ode, Barbara Kowalzig ( Singing for the Gods , 230-1) argues that the poem provides an etiology for the fireless sacrifice established for Athena at Rhodes. Why a sacrifice without fire, given that “as is nowhere clearer than in Aristophanes’ Birds, on the whole it…
Israel gets its first taste of war after the exodus when the Amalekites attack the women, children, and stragglers (Exodus 17; Deuteronomy 25:17-19). Yahweh vows to make war against those who make war on the weak, until He blots out “the memory of Amalek from under heaven” (Deuteronomy 25:19). He…
The letter to the angel of Sardis (Revelation 3:1-6) is smoothly cohesive in theme. Jesus begins with a rebuke to the angel at Sardis, charging that despite his reputation for life he is in fact dead. Death and sleep are merged in verse 2, where Jesus calls the dead to…
Jesus has the key of David to open and shut (Revelation 3:8). He puts an “open door” before the angel of Philadelphia. Which way is the angel to go: In or out? The passage is typically understood with reference to mission. The angel is pictured on the inside of some…
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