Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Romans 8:31-39 is better sung than commented upon. It’s a thrilling, ecstatic hymn of boisterous assurance that God’s purposes will be accomplished. Yet, I will attempt to comment on them. If we sing Paul’s hymn, let’s make sure we sing with understanding. Given the character of these verses, it’s easy…
"An ethic unshaped by eschatology is neither Jesus’ nor Christian.” - Tremper Longman How does an immature culture grow up? Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver is about the dangers of being lost in adolescence. By the end of the movie, the viewer is pointed to a road we infer leads to…
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Prolegomena 1. “You’re a pastor,” my new friend says as we sit down, “and you’re a massage therapist. How does that work?” To her, Christianity implies stuffy ideology, a disregard of the physical. A Christian massage therapist is an oddity; a pastor massage therapist is nearly a contradiction in terms.…
54% of Poles think favorably of Americans, only 13% unfavorably, according to Centrum Badania Opinii Spolecznej . Ten years ago, the numbers were 44% and 21% respectively. Twenty years ago, they were 64% and 6%. Back in the 1990s, Americans were the most liked nation among Poles. Now they are…
Stones of Life and Death Of course, the sex of a child is not a choice between light and darkness or life and death. Sex, like circumcision, is a horizontal demarcation, a delegation of roles within humanity. In contrast, the white stone and the black stone within the “liturgical scrotum”…
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A student suggests that Isaiah 61 is chiastically organized, and centers on verses 5-6, which promise that strangers will pasture the flocks of Israel and that Israel will consume the treasures of the nations. Overall, the passage announces the good news of return, the great Jubilee of Israel’s restoration to…
Accommodation is often trotted out as a way to account for the unscientific language of Scripture. We now know that the earth does not rise and set, but the ancient Hebrews did not know that, and so God accommodated Himself to their (low) level of scientific knowledge when He guided…
Perhaps it’s the JPS Tanakh translation, but it struck me that the Samson narratives manifest the broad comedy of a Babylonian myth or the legends compiled by Levi-Strauss. He goes about tearing lions like lambs, posing riddles, lighting foxes on fire, and so on and on. Only moralistic Christians could…
Leviticus 10 is often cited in support of the Reformed “Regulative Principle of Worship.” It does support that principle, but not if the principle is formulated, as it often is, as “whatever is not commanded is forbidden.” The sin of Nadab and Abihu was offering “strange” or “unauthorized” fire on…
Frank Gorman says that ritual in Bible is means of maintaining order of world against chaos: “ritual must function as a means of ‘manipulating’ the orders of creation. It is the means by which the categories of ‘order’ and ‘chaos’ can be negotiated. Ritual thus must be seen as the…
In his stimulating Clark Lectures (recently published as Grace and Necessity ), Rowan Williams suggests, following David Jones, that there are certain ontological conditions for the possibility of poetry: “the ontology, if we can use that forbidding word here, of a universe that is inextricably both material and significative, where…
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