Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Why there is more to Jephthah than meets than eye It was not that long ago that I realized the Jephthah-story and the Jesus-story were basically the same story. Sounds crazy, I know. But here is a one-paragraph synopsis of both: The people of God have gone their own way,…
G.K. Chesterton famously said that the Gospels don’t reveal Jesus’ mirth. It’s true we never catch Jesus laughing. But can we believe He never did? I don’t think so. Laughter is human, and Jesus was fully human. Jesus promised that those who mourned would laugh. He mourned; would He not…
Matthew 2 has all the elements of an exodus story. There’s a murderous king, who slaughters Jewish babies. There’s a infant who will be Israel’s future deliverer, saved from the murderous king so He can later return to save His people and lead them to the Promised land. There’s an…
The calendar of Israel was primarily theological, centered on commemorating the salvific acts of God, but also agricultural, celebrating the creation-restoring effects of those salvific acts. The feasts of the first month celebrated the reviving of the world in the Spring, and typified the cutting off of the Savior in…
The chiastic shape corresponds to the shape of human life. This should not surprise us, because we are made in the image of God, and God is manifest in Word and Spirit. If we are living epistles, our lives will look a bit like the literary shape of the books…
Back in January, Venkatesh Rao wrote a fascinating post on the Ribbonfarm blog, discussing different forms of models of narrative. Engaging with Ursula LeGuin’s talk ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ , Rao explores her contrast between the (male) ‘hero narrative’ and the (female) ‘carrier-bag story’, and suggests a third…
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As David Goldman sees, it , last week's fatal accident involving an Uber self-driving car is emblematic of our techno-Utopianism. "If the brain is merely a machine that white-coated lab techs can measure and manipulate like any other machine, and if machines can programmed to emulate the human brain, then…
Eric Cohen puts his finger on one of the glaring flaws of Patrick Deneen's recent Why Liberalism Failed . Deneen's is a strangely ahistorical account of liberalism: "Deneen treats American society as if it is simply a Lockean (or Madisonian) abstraction. For a book that celebrates the importance of particular…
Ahaz of Judah makes "molten images for the Baals" (2 Chronicles 28:2). He's the only king in Chronicles to do so. The term massekah is used only twice in Chronicles, once of Ahaz's making, the other of Josiah's destruction of molten things (2 Chronicles 34:3-4). The term reaches back to…
Alan Hayward ( Creation and Evolution ) summarizes some of the evidence for an old earth. Some lines of evidence are fairly powerful. He points to sandwich structures on the ocean floor: A base of hardened sediment with fossils, a layer of large coral reefs, an upper layer of sediment…
Lytton Strachey, famed as a member of the "Bloomsbury Group" and for his war against Victorian values, wrote to Leonard (husband of Virginia) Woolf in 1904: "I sometimes feel as if it were not only ourselves who are concerned, but that the destinies of the whole world are somehow involved…
By the Chronicler's lights, Ahaz is the worst king Judah ever has. He is the only king of whom it's explicitly said that he did " not do right" (2 Chronicles 28:1). That not-right is unpacked with six more verbs, making a full seven of wickedness. 1)Did not do right,…
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