Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Bruce Marshall once wrote that every young man who rings the bell at a brothel is unconsciously looking for God. While it is not necessarily true that the inward desire of every man is ultimately a thirst for righteousness, it is true that every sin is the disordering of a…
In a previous essay , I argued that the story which begins with Lot and culminates in Ruth’s great-grandson David follows God’s five-fold pattern of creative work as laid out by Jim Jordan: taking something in hand (in this case, the Abrahamic family), restructuring it, distributing the product of labor,…
Gilder, George. Men and Marriage. Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2023. 1 By 1973, the hightide of second-wave feminism had flooded the beaches of American culture. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique eroded the shores of traditional female roles by naming and stirring up further domestic discontentment. Kate Millet wrote her dissertation-turned-book,…
The Book of Job is a very tortuous book. The arguments of Job and his friends are shot through with truth and error hopelessly mixed together. Every line of contentious poetry stands locked in deadly battle with every other line. As maddening as this can be for a reader who…
More than once in the last 50 years it has occurred to me that Paul might have known Jesus before He appeared to Paul on the Damascus road, but I had never taken up the notion in earnest until recently when I ran into a book by Stanley Porter titled…
The question in the title is genuine, not polemic. I could be perfectly happy to follow an ancient — and what is regarded as a well-attested — tradition. But I do not feel compelled to follow it simply because it is tradition. I would like to have arguments that Peter…
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Revelation 18 ends with a terrible description of post-apocalyptic Babylon, a city fallen. The description focuses on the silence, enumerating the sounds ( phone , 3x in vv. 22-23) that are no longer found. Sounds, and the unseen sights. We've seen this scene before - in I Am Legend and…
Though over a decade old, David Martin's Pentecotalism: The World Their Parish is still a revelation. Densely textured in both form and matter, it demands, and rewards, slow and careful reading. This is partly because of the book's reprise of Martin's arguments concerning secularization (see his updated theorizing On Secularization…
April Westbrook's “And He Will Take Your Daughters” takes its title from 1 Samuel 8, the prophet Samuel's warning speech to Israel about the dangers of kingship. Westbrook shows that the stories of both Saul and David bear out the warning. The “woman stories” in 1-2 Samuel not only expose…
In a number of places in his writing on Pentecostalism, David Martin refers to a musical variant of the “Halevy thesis,” Elie Halevy's argument that the evangelical revival that birthed Methodism was the framework within which English religion and culture developed during the 19th century. Martin's variant is a musical…
Revelation 18 has an obvious surface structure. Three speakers are introduced - an angel from heaven (v. 1), another voice from heaven (v. 4), and a strong angel tossing a millstone (v. 21). The first angel and the strong angel have a similar message. The first speaks of the fall…
To defend the resurrection, Paul indulges in a piece of cosmology (1 Corinthians 15:35-49), which circulates around seed, body, flesh, and glory. A seed goes into the ground and a plant comes up. Each seed has a body of its own, a gift from God, and each plant too has…
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