Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The preceding essay has caused me to consider the possibility that the life of Abraham as recounted in Genesis contains a typological prophecy of the history of Israel; that is, that the events in Abraham’s life broadly anticipate events in Israel’s history. This kind of pattern is seen in the…
by: Jeff Meyers and James Jordan In the fifth chapter of John’s gospel we read of a man who had been ill for 38 years and who was lying by a pool located by the Sheep Gate of Jerusalem. This sheep waited, as did many other infirm people, for an…
What had been reduced to ruin by this sex, would by the selfsame sex be recovered to salvation. As Eve believed the serpent, so Mary believed the angel. The delinquency which the one occasioned by believing, the other by believing effaced. —Tertullian What is Paul saying about women and salvation…
Back in Biblical Horizons 132 I discussed the horrible abuse of the converted men of Salem/Shechem in Genesis 34. These Hivites had joined the covenant by circumcision and then were slaughtered by Simeon and Levi. That, however, is not the end of their story. In Joshua 9 we find the…
Genesis 14:14 says that Abram mustered his trained men, “born in his house,” to rescue Lot, and gives their number as 318. It is clear that the precise number is provided for some reason, but what is it? S. Gevirtz notes that 318 is the sum of all the prime…
Simon Peter went up, and drew the net to land, full of large fish, a hundred and fifty-three; and although there were so many, the net was not torn. (John 21:11) This is one of those texts in the Bible that many people puzzle over. It is not a puzzle…
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One should not be surprised, given Peter Leithart’s track record, that something as imaginative as the Trinity Institute for Biblical, Liturgical , and Cultural Studies is to be formed in Birmingham, AL. But it is nonetheless an extraordinary event that should be celebrated not only among the Reformed, but all…
Bonhoeffer ( Ethics ) condemns both radicalism and compromise. Radicalism sees only the ultimate and dismisses and judges the penultimate; “everything penultimate is enmity towards Christ” (p. 127). Compromise ensures that the penultimate retains its rights and is not threatened by the ultimate, but in so doing limits the claims…
Bonhoeffer ( Ethics ) has a superb passage about the “deputy” rather than the isolated individual as the unit of ethical reflection. Everyone, he argues, is a deputy: “The fact that responsibility is fundamentally a matter of deputyship is demonstrated most clearly in those circumstances in which a man is…
A brief in favor of theology as Queen of the sciences at www.firstthings.com this morning.
When I first came to Japan in 1981, I was a premillennial dispensationalist struggling to plant a church in a pagan culture. Jordan’s The Law of the Covenant , which I read in 1984, showed me how the Bible could and must be read to apply to cultural issues today.…
In Ethics , Bonhoeffer discusses the relation of the “ultimate” to the “penultimate,” God to the world, grace to nature. He admits that being man and being good are “penultimate in relation to the justification of the sinner by grace.” But this doesn’t mean that the penultimate conditions or determines…
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