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Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.

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Biblical Studies

Exile or Ark?

In the Fall 2007 issue of JBL is an essay “Jonah Read Intertextually” by Hyun Chul Paul Kim of Methodist Theological School in Delaware, Ohio. The first section of the essay points to numerous linguistic and conceptual parallels between Jonah (“Dove”) and the Noah narrative: Destruction of the earth, including…

by James B. JordanApril 10, 2008
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Biblical Studies

How Mark Came to be Written

The phone rang. “Hello, this is John Mark.” “Hi, JM. This is Simon Peter.” “Oh, hello, Mr. Rock,” said Mark. “What can I do for you?” “Well, JM” said Peter, “I’ve been very impressed by your recent essays in the New Jew Review , especially your series on David as…

by James B. JordanMarch 24, 2008
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Biblical Studies

How Matthew Came to be Written

The sun had set and finally the crowds had dispersed. The disciples gathered in the upper room, exhausted but joyful after preaching and teaching in many different languages all day, not to speak of seeing to the baptism of three thousand people. James bar Alphaeus put on a CD of…

by James B. JordanMarch 20, 2008
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Biblical Horizons

Church-Culture | Cause-Effect

There was a time, I think, when Evangelical Christianity in North America tended to be dominated by what might be (pejoratively) called a “retreatist” or even “defeatist” view of society. For various reasons, Christians believed that society was headed downhill and there was nothing the Church could do about it,…

by Mark HorneMarch 14, 2008
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Genesis

Is Genesis 15 an Attack on Forensic Justification?

Hebrews 11 makes it very clear that Abram (later, Abraham) exercised saving faith from the time he left his home to go wonder in Caanan. He was justified at least from the time of the call in Genesis 12.1-3 on. Yet I keep reading people who think that any appeal…

by Mark HorneMarch 6, 2008
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Biblical Horizons

On Renewing Theology

I spent the last few days at A Conversation on Denominational Renewal , which thankfully met in St. Louis. The conference was well attended, about 300 or more people. The audience was mostly PCA ministers and elders, but because it was held in St. Louis there were a good many…

by Jeff MeyersMarch 1, 2008

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Philosophy

Derrida, Closet Platonist

In Specters of Marxism, Derrida advocates a strongly eschatological Marxism but without committing himself to the specifics of a Marxist analysis of capitalism (must as he advocates a “messianism without messiah”). In both cases, he reaches for a formal structure without content, deliberately, because “content is always deconstructible.” Further, any…

January 19, 2006

Vaporous labor

One man sits and does nothing; and eats himself up. Another labors alone without end; and eats himself up. One folds his hands and refuses to grab anything; and his hands are empty. Another grabs whatever comes near with both hands; and in the end his hands are empty too.…

January 18, 2006

Relativity

Surely Solomon believed there were absolute goods, or One Absolute Good, but he spends most of Ecclesiastes talking about relative goods. The Hebrew idiom tob . . . min (“good/better . . . than”) is used throughout chapters 4 and 7 to express the relative advantage of certain situations in…

January 18, 2006

Tragic Wisdom?

Among all the books of the Bible, Ecclesiastes appears to come closest to the tragic wisdom of the ancients. But this is an illusion. Solomon warns that it is folly to say that the old days were better than the present (7:10), and encourages patience because “the end of the…

January 18, 2006

Ahaz of Judah

The fraternal conflicts between Israel and Judah foreshadow later conflicts between Israel and the true Jew, Jesus. And so, when the Northern Kingdom allies with Aram (its traditional enemy) against Ahaz of Judah, it foreshadows the alliance of Jew and Gentile against the great Son of God. Pilate and Herod…

January 18, 2006
Philosophy

Postmodernity and Social Theory

The late Gillian Rose characterized the postmodern rejection of metaphysics as a triumph of social theory over philosophy, a triumphy that “re-enacts the earlier reaction, coterminous with the founding of modernity, according to which philosophy after Kant was ‘superseded’ by social theory . . . . It resulted in the…

January 18, 2006

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