Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Mrs. Marguerite Lane of Grand Rapids writes to ask if I have ever noticed a correlation between the eight beatitudes of Matthew 5 and the eight woes of Matthew 23. I confess that I have not. A glance at various commentators reveals that such a correspondence does not seem to…
1. The words of Agur, the son of Jakeh, the burden. The man declares to Ithiel, to Ithiel and Ucal: 2. Surely I am more stupid than any other man, And I do not have the understanding of a man. 3. And I have not learned wisdom, But I have…
Psalm 137 is widely regarded as one of the meanest of the imprecatory psalms. Certainly as we read it it is seems to be a song of pure vengeance. The exiles in Babylon, in grief over the judgment that Babylon has brought upon them, pray for the destruction of that…
In the Levitical law, the priests received two particular portions of each peace offering: the "wave offering" of the breast and the "heave offering" (or better, "contribution") of the right thigh. The purpose of this essay is to attempt to determine the reason why the second of these, the thigh,…
The story of Jesus’ visit, early in His ministry, to the synagogue in His home town of Nazareth is recorded for us in Luke 4:16-30. You may remember that Jesus read from Isaiah about how the Messiah would preach the gospel, care for the poor, work miracles, and bring in…
(The essay that follows concerns a rather touchy subject: how the Lord’s Supper is to be done. I am not writing to insult or offend, but to challenge. To that end I have not "held back" but have "gone ahead" and said what I think needs to be said —…
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Alan Kerr ( The Temple of Jesus’ Body: The Temple Theme in the Gospel of John (Library of New Testament Studies) , 71) offers this comment on Jesus’ statement that Nicodemus had to be born of the Spirit before entering the kingdom: “It is almost universally accepted that Spirit here…
In his 1993 Word and Glory: On the Exegetical and Theological Background of John’s Prologue (Library of New Testament Studies) (79-82), Craig A. Evans lays out five parallels between the account of Moses’ intercession at Sinai (Exodus 33-34) and the latter part of the Johannine prologue (1:14-18): First, the general…
At the TLS web site , John Gray reviews Vladimir Tismaneanu’s The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century . Among other things, Gray highlights the continuities between Communism and Fascism. Soviet Russia disenfranchised “former people,” a designation that, according to Tismaneanu implied that they…
In a paper delivered at Princeton in 2012, Jennifer Herdt examines internal shifts in Reformed understandings of natural law enabled a merger between Reformed natural law thinking and “the modern natural law enterprise of the secular science of human nature.” The shift is several-fold. Calvin affirmed that human beings have…
Given the prominence of temple Christology in the New Testament, we’d expect to find it developed among the church fathers and medieval theologians. Athanasius develops Christology from this angle (Letter 60). The Arians, he says, “approve the former people [the Jews] for the honor paid by them to the Temple,…
The Economist is handing out year-end awards for wacky science, one of which goes to the team that published a paper on the trajectory of a falling Batman last summer. The Economist summarizes the findings, which are not encouraging for future Batmen: “if Batman jumped off a 150-metre-tall structure he…
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