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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Barbara Newman has argued in Medieval Crossover that we mistake medieval literature and thought if we look at it from a post-Renaissance angle of vision. Sacred and secular exist in every world, and the shift from medieval to modern doesn’t change that. The issue, though, is which is the default…
Yellowhammer News reports that the Alabama state legislature is considering getting the state out of the marriage business: “State Senator Greg Albritton (R-Range) saw his bill to remove the state government from the marriage business clear its first hurdle Wednesday, after it passed out of the Judiciary committee unanimously. “SB377…
Troilus is mentioned in the Iliad , long enough to die. Priam laments that his best sons have died at Greek hands, leaving him with only the dregs of his family. In Pope's translation: Inglorious sons of an unhappy sire! Why did you not all in Hector’s cause expire? Wretch…
J acques Lacan devoted considerable attention to the psychoanalytical import of the courtly love tradition, and this has been developed at some length by Slavoj Zizek, especially in Metastases of Enjoyment . For Zizek, the elevation of the Lady that takes place in courtly love isn’t a “spiritualization” but rather…
B efore Lacan and Zizek devoted attention to courtly love, there was Denis de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World , which was popular reading among French intellectuals among whom postmodernism arose. It's an exaggeration to say that postmodernism ontologizes courtly love, but it's the kind of exaggeration that gets…
Insofar as Derrida's thought is a thought of the ineffable, retreated sublime, the transcendent signified that escapes language and leaves only traces, his thought is structured like the courtship of a courtly lover. In an essay in the Cardozo Law Review , Barbara Vinken shows that Derrida was quite self-conscious…
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