Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Christmas is a joyful season, but for many it turns into something else. Instead of joy, it is full of disappointment and unhappiness. Instead of an occasion for family fellowship, it becomes an opportunity for opening old wounds, reigniting old arguments, giving new life to rancor that should have died…
The Temple of Time The “covenant-literary matrix” of the Bible is not a pattern imposed upon the text, but the internal logic of its arrangement. This fundamental structure, functioning at multiple levels simultaneously, is a ceaseless reiteration of God’s primary theme. It is an algorithm forged in the furnace of…
In the four hundred and eightieth year after the Exodus, Solomon began to build the temple of the Lord in Jerusalem. [1] That the author of Kings should date the start of the building of the temple from the Exodus is noteworthy. In Exodus 15:17, in Moses’ song following the…
Philip Schaff, a German Reformed theologian, states in The Principle of Protestantism that the material principle of Protestantism is “the doctrine of the justification of the sinner before God by the merit of Christ alone through faith.” This is the core message of the Church which leads “to the abandonment…
“Religion” is an attempt to create or build a tower with a top, or to build a temple that is self-contained. The story of The Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 is the story of mankind’s attempt to create a world that is self-contained and does not need God. All…
In the first essay in this series, I presented a case for dating Matthew before AD 70, contrary to the present scholarly consensus. In this essay, I intend to present cultural, personal, ecclesiological, and theological arguments for a very early date for Matthew. [1] The cultural argument concerns literacy in…
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C atherine Pickstock claims that the rejection of liturgy is central to modernity. Having refused the integrations of liturgy, modernity forges various forms of pseudo-liturgy, pale substitutes to accomplish what the liturgy once did in Western society. One of these pseudo-liturgies is civility: “Once the common ritual basis in which…
D avid Goldman compares “transgressors” Milo Yiannopoulos and Yuja Wang . Milo's transgressiveness is his essence; Wang, a thirty-year-old Chinese pianist, plays the Western repertoire, her transgressiveness evident in her habit of performing in micro-dresses and revealing evening gowns. (Goldman wrote this just before Milo's public humiliation.) Despite her Asian…
P ete Spiliakos makes the counter-intuitive point that Trump's nationalism will fail politically unless it can become more nationalist: Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again' slogan is, paradoxically, insufficiently nationalist. MAGA leaves out African Americans for whom America was not noticeably greater in the past—when, for instance, blacks were prevented from…
1 Chronicles 27:25–31 lists the officials in charge of David's stores and lands. Twelve men are named and each has an area of responsibility: 1. Azmaveth, king's treasuries, v. 25a 2. Jonathan, treasuries in the field, v. 25b 3. Ezri, supervisor of field workers, v. 26 4. Sheim, vineyards, v.…
I n an article on “Liturgy, Art and Politics,” Catherine Pickstock argues that the liturgy holds together universal and particular in a unique way. It does this in part because it “extends the liturgical tension between the ideal and the real to an extreme, and yet still holds the polarities…
I n her meticulous and revealing study of The Eucharist in the Reformation , Lee Palmer Wandel argues that Luther and Zwingli divided at Marburg because their respective positions were incommensurate, incomprehensible each to the other. Specifically, they “divided over the nature of Christ's body,” but that point of division…
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