Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
There’s something about joy that is infectious. And occasionally, we all have the opportunity to be in someone’s presence who is so happily engaged in their work, so joyous in their pursuits, that we want to learn from them. We want to know where that joy comes from and attain…
Jesus has told us that He intends all nations to be discipled. Nations. Not just individuals. All nations as theocracies. That being the case, the Church exists for the life of the world. Being baptized is not only a matter of becoming part of a new family, it is also…
Harold Bloom’s essay on Macbeth includes the kind of penetrating insights that make Bloom the great Shakespearean scholar that he is, but it also includes his typical and intense anti-Christian bias. “If Lear was pre-Christian, then Macbeth is weirdly post-Christian. There are, as we have seen, Christian intimations that haunt…
Revelation 16 is a day of atonement text. The tabernacle of the testimony has been opened (15:5). The angels who receive the bowls are clothed in linen (15:6), the clothing of the high priest when he goes into the sanctuary on the day of atonement (Leviticus 16:4). The temple is…
From time to time, when I’ve lectured on how to read the Bible, I’ve used art-music as one example thereof. When we listen to a simple folk song, we hear the same melody over and over again, but this is not how composers write "high" music. Let me amplify. A…
"For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea-monster, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (Matthew 12:40). Some reflections on Jonah’s Big Fish have led to the following essay. Let me…
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Today, Christian thinkers suggest that certain versions of divine simplicity are at odds with Trinitarian doctrine. I'm one of them. It's not a new thought. At the very beginning of his explicit discussion of the Trinity, Thomas Aquinas asks whether there are processions in God ( ST I, 27, 1).…
Aaron and his sons have been washed, invested, and anointed. They’ve offered a purification offering, an ascension offering, and the ram of ordination. Blood from the ram has been smeared on their right ear lobes, their right thumbs, and their right big toes, consecrating their ears, hands, and feet to…
Marxism, John Gray once slyly commented, didn't emerge from a Russian monastery. It's a Western faith, transplanted to Russia and China and elsewhere. Marxism doesn't grow naturally in these exotic soils. Its program and promise depend on a specifically Western history of industrialization, which produced the great antagonists, the bourgeois…
Aaron and his sons offer three offerings during the ordination rite: A modified form of the priestly purification offering ( hatt’at ); an ascension offering; and, at the climax, the “ram of fillings” (Exodus 29:22; ‘ayil millu’iym ). It resembled a peace offering, insofar as Aaron and his sons eat…
Hope isn’t some optional add-on to life. To flourish, we need hope. Desperate hope, hope against hope, hope in the face of hopelessness, is the narrow path of life for human beings on the way. Without hope, without some expectation or drive for the future, we are imprisoned in the…
Acts 2 is a typologist's dream, or nightmare. It's overstuffed with Scripture. Pentecost arrives. Of course, Pentecost was an Old Testament feast, 50 days after Passover. It was the beginning of the harvest, a firstfruits festival, which fits Acts 2, since it’s the firstfruits of the harvest of the nations.…
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