Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Jonah is Paul’s typological opposite. Indeed, in the whole Old Testament, it would be difficult to find a more perfect foil to Paul than Jonah. Whereas Paul crosses the sea to enact God’s saving purposes for the Gentiles, Jonah crosses the sea to avoid bringing Gentiles God’s mercy. For that…
Years ago, I realized that if my children wanted to feel like their house was a home, I needed to be intentional about making our physical shelter a place of spiritual refuge. I began to see the Holy Spirit as the indwelling person of the Trinity—the one who makes His…
When the crowds encircle Christ in Solomon’s Porch during the Festival of Dedication, they charge him: “tell us boldly who you are!” 1 They do not draw-up to him to with excited anticipation as they did earlier in the Gospel, 2 instead they flank him like a gang of wolves.…
1 In Deuteronomy 7:1-5, Moses wrote: When Yahweh your God brings you into the land which you go to possess, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations…
Every Advent witnesses the gruesome reanimation of the voice that whispers “you know , Christmas is just a pagan holiday…” with that sort of conversational ellipsis that does not so much invite further reflection but halts and forecloses it. The claims are several and equally spurious: Jesus wasn’t born on…
Abraham's life in Genesis is a series of trials. He travels hundreds of miles from his family into a new land, flees from a famine into the hands of a king who takes his wife, and after returning, has to rescue his brother from a war. He's involved with two…
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The account of the interactions between Elisha and the Shunammite woman (2 Kings 4) includes several episodes, but it is a unified narrative, arranged as a modified chiasm: A. Shunammite woman prepares an upper room for Elisha, 4:8-11. B. Elisha promises the woman a son, 4:12-17 (“Call this Shunammite,” v…
There are some problems in Theodore Jennings’s Outlaw Justice (note my comments here ). But there are many, many insights in Jennings’s consistently political reading of Romans. On the Spirit’s intercession (135), for instance, he writes, that “the traditional translation, [the Spirit] ‘helps us,’ is, I think, flat wrong -…
The wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23). We hear that, and translate it into: “We do sinful acts; God punishes us with death; the ‘wage’ sin pays is death.” As Lloyd Gaston hints in Paul and the Torah , that doesn’t fit the way Paul uses the word “sin,”…
In his contribution to Galatians and Christian Theology , Oliver O’Donovan explores the flesh-Spirit opposition in Paul’s theology. He observes that flesh is associated with the law and with the elements, and glosses: “A moral law with multiple demands enslaves us. That is the truth of polytheism, explored long ago…
The locust plague that John sees coming from the abyss sounds like an army, chariots and horses rushing into battle (Revelation 9:9). Locusts that sound like chariots have appeared already in Joel (2:5), and the voice of horses is the voice of cherubim (Ezekiel 1:24; 3:13; 10:5). The locust horde…
There’s an enormous amount of chronological information in the Bible, but it is rare for Scripture to date an event by day, month, and year together. It happens at the completion of major construction projects, when worlds are completed - the world of the tabernacle (Exodus 40:17), the temple (2…
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