Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In the first part of this essay, I argued that the story of the covenant is what unifies and grounds the laws in the book of Deuteronomy. In the third section of this essay, as part of my argument that Deuteronomy 14:1-21 forms a distinct pericope, I claimed that these…
Paul ends 1 Timothy with convicting warnings about the temptations of wealth and the danger of pursuing wealth. Godliness involves contentment and gratitude for the basics – food and clothing (1 Timothy 6:8). To reinforce the point, Paul reminds Timothy that we came into the world without anything, which is…
Like Marx himself, the Marxist sociologist Henri Lefebvre was a firm believer in the dictum that “the criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism,” though he dissented from Marx’s prior claim that the criticism of religion is essentially complete. He includes a vicious, sarcastic, Marxist diatribe against the…
This week, Trinity House fellows James Jordan, Jeff Meyers, Rich Bledsoe, and Peter Leithart will be lecturing in Niceville, Florida, at the Biblical Horizons Summer Conference. Fore more information, check the Biblical Horizons web site.
Fire seems to be a motif in Isaiah 6. The chapter opens “in the year that king Uzziah died,” and we know that Uzziah died a leper because he tried to burn incense in the temple against the law of God. And in this context, in the year king Uzziah…
According to the medieval theory of the "Quadriga" or the "fourfold sense" of Scripture, each passage of Scripture has four dimensions of meaning. Protestants generally cast a suspicious eye on this "method" of reading. That's a mistake. It's a handy guide to the questions we should always ask as we…
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Wittgenstein, Jamie Smith argues, “relativizes the claims of logic without simply rejecting them.” He rejects not logic but “logical foundationalism” that takes logic as an “ideal language” that functions as “the norm for all languages” ( Who’s Afraid of Relativism? 58). It’s possible to see logic as such an ideal…
Jamie Smith ( Who’s Afraid of Relativism? ) defends Richard Rorty against the charge that he leaves behind an antirealism that implies we cannot refer to the world, perhaps an antirealism that denies the existence of extra-linguistic things. In Smith’s summary, “realist critics confuse having a theory of reference and…
Drawing from Pindar’s seventh Olympian Ode, Barbara Kowalzig ( Singing for the Gods , 230-1) argues that the poem provides an etiology for the fireless sacrifice established for Athena at Rhodes. Why a sacrifice without fire, given that “as is nowhere clearer than in Aristophanes’ Birds, on the whole it…
Israel gets its first taste of war after the exodus when the Amalekites attack the women, children, and stragglers (Exodus 17; Deuteronomy 25:17-19). Yahweh vows to make war against those who make war on the weak, until He blots out “the memory of Amalek from under heaven” (Deuteronomy 25:19). He…
The letter to the angel of Sardis (Revelation 3:1-6) is smoothly cohesive in theme. Jesus begins with a rebuke to the angel at Sardis, charging that despite his reputation for life he is in fact dead. Death and sleep are merged in verse 2, where Jesus calls the dead to…
Jesus has the key of David to open and shut (Revelation 3:8). He puts an “open door” before the angel of Philadelphia. Which way is the angel to go: In or out? The passage is typically understood with reference to mission. The angel is pictured on the inside of some…
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