Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
“We have a God who hides things because He loves to be sought out, chewed out and found out.” As Christians, we are rightly taught that we must not question God’s Word. The problem is that the Scriptures record many things which appear to have been given to us for…
The book of Revelation is a liturgy. John begins “in the Spirit” on the “Lord’s day” (1:10). Jesus appears, and Jesus tells him to record messages to seven churches, words of encouragement and rebuke, like the call to worship and confession at the beginning of a Christian liturgy. In chapter…
In my previous posts, I looked at the theme of creation as it is found in a sequence of psalms devoted to Yahweh’s Kingship (Psalms 93-100). Among other matters, these psalms declare that when the Kingdom of Israel’s God comes, it is the Kingdom of the world’s own Creator .…
The church in Corinth was a pastoral nightmare. Factionalism, sexual immorality, incipient syncretism, using the church as a stage for self-promotion, and denial of the final resurrection were just some of the problems. In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian church, he confronts each of these problems directly and in…
The first chapters of the Word of God have a poetic rhythm. This is used to discredit their accuracy as historical narrative, but the truth is that these same rhythms continue far beyond the book of Genesis. In fact, the later texts shed light on the frustratingly succinct account of…
Mr. Martian: What’s that there? Mr. Edison: (Edison holds up a standard, 60 watt lightbulb). It’s a lightbulb. Mr. Martian: A “lightbulb” you say? What exactly is a “lightbulb”? Mr. Edison: A lightbulb is an object used to illuminate a dark area, say a room. It’s made primarily of filament…
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America often claims to be the cornerstone of global order. Much of its foreign policy, argues George Friedman ( The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century , 46), is about creating disorder in order to prevent another power from imposing order and gaining power. If you think…
Reader Cas Saternos offers these thoughts in response to a post several weeks ago on knowing. The rest of this post is from him: Your comments on the three stage or “moments” of knowing fit well with the use of the term “know” in the musical realm. Consider the phrase…
Jenson summarizes Jonathan Edwards’ critique of substance in Systematic Theology: Volume 2: The Works of God (Systematic Theology (Oxford Hardcover)) (39-41). Edwards targets the mechanization of the world in Newton and Locke, arguing that “Christianity could not long coexist with a mechanistic worldview.” That was no problem, since for Edwards…
Jenson ( The knowledge of things hoped for : the sense of theological discourse , 174) summarizes his critique of Bultmann thusly: “For Bultmann, when Jesus’ history is to be told as about God, as eschatological occurrence, it is reduced to the ‘that.’ In the proclamation we meet the Christ…
Deeana Copeland Klepper, The Insight of Unbelievers: Nicholas of Lyra and Christian Reading of Jewish Text in the Later Middle Ages (Jewish Culture and Contexts) . Philadelphia:University ofPennsylvania Press, 2007. Modern biblical criticism is the product of Jewish-Christian cooperation. On the one hand, it is a creation of Anti-Calvinist Pietists…
William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Hardback, 285 pp, $49.95. In the beginning was religion, and only religion. Now religion was irrational, absolutist, and divisive, and so chaos was on the face of the…
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