Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Summary : The Bible is a multi-faceted text. As a result, it can fruitfully be analyzed in many ways. Pace, context, flow, imagery: all of these aspects of the Biblical text are significant and instructive. Here, by way of illustration, I analyze Gen. 38 in a range of different ways,…
Summary: The Bible is a multi-faceted text. As a result, it can fruitfully be analysed in many ways. Pace, context, flow, imagery: all of these aspects of the Biblical text are significant and instructive. Here, by way of illustration, I analyse Gen. 38 in a range of different ways, and…
The closing chapters of the Bible bring to fulfillment the mission inaugurated in the opening chapters of the Bible: the dwelling place of God expands to fill the entire new creation. The story of Scripture concludes having achieved God’s original intent for His people in the Garden of Eden, and…
Oddly, the nature of pre -modern economies plays a central role in today’s policy debate over economic globalization and neo-liberalism. Analysts take ancient non-market economies as the standard against which to measure the economic and social effects of the market system. Scholars compare the distribution of economic goods and services…
In part one of this essay, I mentioned that the story of Zacchaeus includes not only many details that point to other passages in Luke, but also details that point to the Old Testament, though we might not initially think of them. The first detail I have in mind is…
The story of Zacchaeus includes numerous interesting details that link this story with others in the Gospel of Luke. There are also details that tie the story of Zacchaeus to the Old Testament in ways that we might not initially take note of. In the Gospel of Luke, the story…
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Peter Brown asks this question in the first essay in Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World (Canto original series) and sensibly, following the lead of RA Markus, tries to let early Christians themselves answer. There isn’t a single answer. Early in the fourth century,…
Milbank often makes this point, but it’s huge: “Likewise the household, the site of productive provision, was not an arena of ‘politics’ and dialectical disputation, but of unquestioned paternal control. The Christian gothic ‘merging’ of oikos and polis , which as Ruskin in particular grasped, opened the question of virtue…
Mediating institutions - those formations and associations that stand between the individual and the state - are essential for freedom, we’re often told. I agree with the aim, but have questions about whether the notion of mediating institutions gets at it. The main objection is that the theory appears to…
The Aaronic blessing promises the “face” and “countenance” of Yahweh, and places the name of God on the people of God (Numbers 6:27). Psalm 44 explains these words of blessing. Yahweh’s hand drove out nations and planted Israel in the land (v. 2) because He shone the “light of [His]…
David Potter confirms Augustine’s claim that the foreign wars of Rome were an extension of a lust for domination and honor: Roman “thinking [about the outside world] involved terms such as gloria , the glory that was won in battle, the ability to compel a foreign people to do something.…
David Stone Potter again: “Homeric archaeology did not begin with Calvert or Schliemann. It was a feature of life in the second and third centuries AD, when ancient monuments were recognized as such and attached to the world of the poems. There is no reason to doubt that the scepter…
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