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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Section 1.18 Cur Deus Homo contains a strange, very medieval digression on the question of whether the number of elect human beings is equal to, less, or greater than the number of fallen angels, and whether God created humans to make up the number of fallen angels. Through a series…
Anselm ( Cur Deus Homo , 1.18) offers this lovely description of the consummation of all things. Creation consists on the one hand of the blessed city that is being built and brought to consummation. Physical creation is also destined to be renewed into something better ( in melius renovandam…
God’s honor cannot be diminished or increased in itself, but when human beings refuse to honor and obey Him, Anselm says ( Cur Deus Homo , 1.15), they dishonor God in relation to themselves. In so far as they are able, the disobedient disturb the “order and beauty of the…
Jacob Taubes - part historian, part philosopher, mostly stand-up comedian - gives this hilarious anecdote to illustrate how Paul conquered the European imagination ( The Political Theology of Paul (Cultural Memory in the Present) , 41): “I have a very good friend - now he’s a bishop in Stockholm, he…
At the outset of Cur Deus Homo? Anselm cannot pull himself away from the beauty of the atonement. To say God humbled himself is not unsuitable ( convenire ) and makes no injury to God. It is perfectly appropriate, as evident from the symmetry of fall and redemption: Death enters…
For a sophisticated theologian, Conor Cunningham’s arguments ( Darwin’s Pious Idea: Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong ) against a literal interpretation of Genesis 1 are remarkably thin. He follows what he describes as a “sophisticated” patristic hermeneutics, and adds “After all, if the first two chapters…
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