Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Figure: Literary structure of the Garden narrative The Garden narrative describes God forming the adam , resting him in his presence, then provisioning for his appetites of food, vocation, and mate. It continues to describe a snake, the introduction of death, and humanity's expulsion from the garden. The pages of…
I’ve spent the last few years studying the theology of St. Irenaeus (d. circ. 200ad). In particular, I’ve been gripped by the way that Irenaeus consistently resisted the anti-body emphasis that emerged in later Christian theology. His eschatology is remarkably focused on the resurrection of the body, and the renewal…
Details of Jesus in Exodus 1:22-2:25 Although there are a great many Christ-types in the Old Testament, it is hard to overplay the obviousness of some that seem to necessarily rise to the top before others. One of these is Isaac, with his near sacrifice by his own father after…
What can we say about Cain's wicked sanctuary-city of Enoch? First that it was built with a brother's blood as its cornerstone. The Church is also built such, for Jesus was the younger brother of the whole Adamic race, slain by that company of older brothers because they hated Him.…
In Genesis 2:9 the ground brought forth trees good for food, delightful to view, and in two cases, life-giving or rule-bestowing. Adam, made of the ground (2:7), would by implication bring forth new trees, and thus trees and plants are among the symbols for human beings throughout the Bible. The…
One of the must fundamental teachings of the Bible and of the Christian religion is that man does not have life in himself. Man must get life from outside of himself, in order to maintain his life. The way this is done is through eating and drinking. Apart from life,…
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Analyzing Rodney Stark’s treatment of the virgin birth of Jesus in his review of Stark’s latest book, The Victory of Reason (TNR January 6, 2006), Alan Wolfe writes, “Mary’s virgin birth has what [Charles] Freeman calls a ‘shaky’ scriptural basis, given that the Gospels mention her siblings and that one…
INTRODUCTION Christians usually think of the book of 1-2 Kings as “historical,” and Jews have long classified it as “prophetic.” For Christians, 1-2 Kings is above all about the gospel. FORMER PROPHET Because the Jewish classification of Kings may be unfamiliar, we should spend a bit of time examining it.…
In his history of Russian culture, James Billington notes the influence of Shakespeare’s Hamlet on modern Russian thought and drama. It was “one of the first plays to be regularly performed on the Russian stage,” so that “Hamlet became a kind of testing ground for the Russian critical imagination.” The…
Everyone with a more than elementary understanding of how language works knows that words can have different meanings in different contexts. The more intriguing phenomenon, and one exploited by poets and novelists, is that a word can have a different meaning, or a very different referent in a new context,…
Perhaps we should not call it “intertextuality,” but something like intertextuality is necessary to textual meaning, even at the most basic levels. You cannot read a single sentence without bringing some knowledge of the language to bear on the text. The reader must have information from outside the text if…
The inherently inter-textual character of textual meaning appears to be a reflex of Trinitarian relations. To wit: Each person of the Triune God is God Himself. As the Athanasian creed said, The Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God; yet there are not three gods but…
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