Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
WHAT IS THE OT PRECURSOR OF THE NT OFFICE OF PASTOR? HOW DOES THE FORMER ILLUMINATE THE LATTER? The first problem to address is: how do we know that there is an office of pastor in the New Testament? 1 Perhaps the way the question is put may permit me…
[This essay was originally published in December, 1981, in The Biblical Educator , a publication of the Institute for Christian Economics, and again with slight revisions in Contra Mundum 7 (Spring, 1993). It is reprinted here as a supplement to my book Creation in Six Days .] In 1979, Dr.…
Anyone seeking to reverse the meaning of this promise needs to come to grips not only with the phrase "God was with the lad" later on, but also with Hagar’s response in 16:13. She worships Yahweh, putting her trust in Him and obeying Him. In fact, Hagar is at the…
Ishmael is the narrator of Melville’s fantasy-romance Moby Dick. Melville takes up the traditional view of Ishmael as a wayward son of Abraham, driven out solely because of the Divine "caprice" of election, an angry man with his hand raised against all other men. He is a fitting "anti-hero," or…
There were five cities at the center of the Canaanite culture in the circle of the Jordan, a place like the Garden of Eden, like the land of Egypt, before it became the Dead Sea at the destruction of the cities (Genesis 13:10). Genesis 14:2 tells us their names: Sodom,…
Meditations by James B. Jordan Genesis 19, the destruction of Sodom and the rescue of Lot, is part two of a story that begins in Genesis 18. These two chapters happen in one 24-hour period: noon and evening in Mamre, and midnight and daybreak in Sodom. God and two angels…
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“T he time has come,” writes Luigino Bruni ( The Wound and the Blessing ), “to rewrite the economic and civil history of societies, taking seriously the civil and economic role of charisms.” It's impossible “to understand either the past or the present situation in European economics deeply (or well…
I n Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue , Ryan Patrick Hanley explains why Smith considered the “inequality of precommercial societies [to be] infinitely more pernicious than the inequality to be found in commercial society.” He does this by demonstrating “how the conditions that afford the powerful with maximal…
A t the Daily Beast , Joel Kotkin exposes the “arrogance of Blue America,” expressed in talk of Blue State secession and contempt for Red State Trump country. According to Kotkin, “The blue bourgeoisie’s self-celebration rests on multiple misunderstandings of geography, demography, and economics. To be sure, the deep blue…
I ’ve quoted this before, often, but it's so good it merits re-quotation. From Luther's 1528 “Confession”: These are the three Persons and the one God, Who has given Himself to us wholly with all that He is and all that He has. The Father gives Himself to us, with…
R eviewing Adrian Forty's Concrete and Culture in the TLS , James Hall summarizes the shifting fortunes of concrete as a building material: “Reinforced concrete's global heyday spanned roughly from the 1920s to the 60s, when exposed, cantilevered concrete was all the (modernist) rage. Then a pragmatic and/or postmodernist reaction…
D on-John Dugas's recent Shakespeare for Everyman offers a revisionist account of the rise of “authentic” stagings of Shakespeare in the twentieth century. The very meaning of “authentic” changed, as Sally Barnden explains in her TLS review of Dugas's book: “Authentic Shakespeare performance was no longer understood to be that…
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