Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Introduction Isaiah 21 can only be understood in the light of its placement in the architecture of the second “volume” of the prophecy (chapters 13–27). The contents are arranged in twin sevenfold “columns” that represent the great bronze pillars of Solomon’s Temple: Jachin and Boaz, priest and king. The priestly…
A Biblical Reflection on the Purpose of the Constellations The starry heavens hold a place of wonder in the hearts of men. Since man’s creation we have looked up into the heavens and have beheld its glory. This is particularly true of the night sky. The stars, in their shinning…
The case for there being five discourses within the Gospel according to Matthew is a hard one to challenge: surely the closing formula “when Jesus finished these sayings” as found in 8:1, 11:1, 13:53, 19:1, and 26:1 settles it once and for all. And by the five instances of the…
The Long Commission The Great Commission of Matthew 28 has long been a cornerstone of American Evangelicalism. It has formed and fashioned the American church’s missional impulse. Yet when viewed from the wide lens of Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, the Great Commission is revealed as one of the pillars…
I am delighted to see that more and more churches in the Reformed tradition are now recognizing that all baptized children are members of the body of Christ and therefore ought to be communing with the rest of the body at the Lord’s Table. This has been decades in the…
Good leaders have always been rare. In today’s world, they seem extinct. Joe Rigney’s recent book Leadership and Emotional Sabotage digs into the spiritual reasons for the leadership epidemic and recommends cures. Rigney starts with a summary of a book by Edwin Friedman called A Failure of Nerve . Friedman’s…
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Featherstone: “one of the characteristics of postmodern art in the 1960s was its attack on institutionalized art: on the museums and galleries, the critical academic hierarchies of taste, and the consecration of works of art as clearly demarcated objects of display. This attack on autonomous, institutionalized art was itself not…
Charles Jencks lamented in his Language of Postmodern Architecture that the term had been used in ways opposite to his own usage: “When I first wrote the book in 1975 and 1976 the word and concept of Post-Modernism had only been used with any frequency in literary criticism. Most perturbing,…
Featherstone again: “Postmodernism effectively thrusts aesthetic questions toward the center of sociological theory: it offers aesthetic models and justifications for the reading and critique of texts (the pleasure of the text, intertextuality, writerly texts) and aesthetic models for life (the expressive aestheticization of life, art as the good of life).”
Featherstone wisely notes the danger of “simply relabelling experiences as postmodern which were formerly granted little significance,” and laments that many definitions of postmodernism are too loose and vague to be useful. Yet, even if contemporary thinkers are simply re-packaging established patterns of social and cultural life, it is worth…
The Modernday Dictionary of Deceived Ideas offers this definition of postmodernism “This word has no meaning. Use it as often as possible.” Mike Featherstone, who quotes this dictionary, offers a more serious discussion of what postmodernism means when applied to artistic movemements. He gives this summary of the sensibility of…
INTRODUCTION Waltke proposes the following structure for chapter 13. 13:1 is an introductory verse that picks up on the exhortations of the prologue to listen to the father’s instruction. There is a multiple inclusion around the chapter. The “discipline” of v. 1 is taken up in v. 24, and the…
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