Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
G.K. Chesterton assumes a surprising and memorable perspective from which to view the events of Palm Sunday (Matthew 21:1-11) The Donkey by: G.K. Chesterton When fishes flew and forests walked And figs grew upon thorn, Some moment when the moon was blood Then surely I was born. With monstrous head…
There is a common biblical principle: you must give back what you steal. In the Bible, restitution is repayment with interest. If you rob someone of their money, you have to pay back double what you stole. A thief must pay back fourfold if he steals a sheep, and if…
Identifying Isaiah’s suffering servant with the promised Messiah is unthinkable for a Jew because it combines the offices of humble priest and victorious king. While it is frustrating that Jews refuse to see the sufferings of Christ in Isaiah 53, the reluctance of Christians to interpret the passage in its…
Let everything that has breath praise the Lord! Praise the Lord! Psalm 150:6 (ESV) The command to praise God is pervasive throughout Scripture. In the verse above the Spirit calls all things with breath to praise the Lord. Song is also clearly featured all throughout Scripture and is a featured…
“Gender is a social construct.” That’s shocking to people who have assumed that gender and sex were synonyms but at least since I was in college, in the ‘80s, we were taught that “gender” refers to the forms, the customs, the traditions that our culture teaches us to define what…
In Genesis 49, Jacob prophesies about (blesses and curses?) his twelve sons. The first three of them don’t fare well. Jacob recalls Reuben’s offense of taking his concubine (Genesis 35:22) and the murderous violence of Simeon’s and Levi against the Canaanite inhabitants of the city of Shechem (Genesis 34). He…
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“Do not leg the sun go down on your anger, and do not give the devil an opportunity.” It sounds spooky and bizarre: Are we in danger of being haunted by some anger-demon? Once we remember that “diabolos” means “slanderer,” it’s no longer the stuff of horror movies. It’s a…
Bruce Holsinger’s book, The Premodern Condition , is reviewed in the April 14 issue of TLS. Holsinger is tracing the rise of theory in France of the 1960s, and shows that the avant garde was “surprisingly heavily indebted to medievalism.” He describes their relationship to the medieval past as “sacramental”…
2 Kings 17:23: So Israel was carried away into exile. In this morning’s sermon, I suggested that we should read the conclusion of the history of the North as part of the gospel story. This passage highlights the fact that Israel’s failure was a failure to believe God, a failure…
Easter is about faith, because by His resurrection Jesus has been installed as the mediator, the firmament boundary between God and man. In the Old Testament, priests served as mediators, who stood in the middle between God and man. Organized in a ring around Yahweh’s tent, the priests served as…
Baptism, Luther says in his Small Catechism, is not water only, but water “comprehended in God’s word and connected with God’s command.” The following question asks what word constitutes the water as baptism, and cites Matthew 28: “Go ye therefore . . . ” That is, the word that constitutes…
Baillie quotes the opening lines of Rousseau’s Confessions , and notes that it, like Descartes’s cogito, is an “effort to avert attention from what Girard calls mimetic desire, the elimination of which is tantamount to the rejection of Christian anthropology. Rousseau begins his Confessions not with a prayer, but with…
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