Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In an earlier paper 1 I argued that the story of Jonah belongs in the book of KINGS. Jonah and the unnamed Judean prophet in 1K13 are paired by the author through literary links. The Judean prophet travels longitudinally to confront national paganism and is killed but not swallowed by…
The Scriptures have much to say about “the day.” “This is the day that the Lord has made,” sings the Psalmist (Psalm 118:24). But what exactly is the day ? Or, more broadly, what even is a day? Days make up human life like water, light, and air. There’s no…
According to the Westminster Confession of Faith 21:5, “God is to be worshipped everywhere, in spirit and truth, …” A similar phrase is found in the OPC’s Directory for Public Worship (II.6). In my experience in the OPC and other Reformed churches, the phrase is often interpreted to mean that…
Introduction In Genesis 3:16, after the fall, God said that Eve would “desire” her husband and that her husband would “rule” over her. It is popular for Christians to interpret Eve's desire as sinful, that she would try to usurp her husband's authority. Likewise, some interpret Adam's rule as sinful,…
White Western/Christian society has long discriminated against lesbians and homosexuals — ever since the days of Moses — who was neither white nor Christian, but that is beside the point — who claimed that God gave him revelation about what a man or woman is and how they should relate…
They Found a Book in a Wall, You Won’t Believe What Happens Next The secret behind the history of quiet times will make your quiet times more effective than ever. One of the enduring mysteries of American Evangelicalism is the question of the source of Quiet Times: A Handbook ,…
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Revelation seems to be the province of fundamentalists, dispensationalists, popapocalyptics. It's far too cartoonish, stark, violent, demanding to be at home in the mainline. Craig Koester ( Revelation and the End of All Things ) points out that mainline churches actually hear very little of the Apocalypse in church. The…
Yahweh brings a devastating judgment on His own people and on Edom, slaughtering and destroying them. He empties the land of Edom, and fills their cities with wild animals (Isaiah 34-35). What has this got to do with us? Everything. What Isaiah depicts is a figure of the gospel story.…
God only speaks twice directly to the reader in Revelation, Craig Koester points out ( Revelation and the End of All Things , 51). He says the same thing both times: “I am the Alpha and the Omega . . . who is and who was and who comes, the…
You get the gist of Rajan Menon's argument from the title of his forthcoming book: The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention . The position he opposes is based on the assumption that the end of the Cold War fundamentally altered geopolitical conditions, and that our contemporary interconnected world is converging toward…
Janine Barchas ( Matters of Fact in Jane Austen ) says that Austen's world had a nascent celebrity culture. Baronets were well known; court scandals made news. There was an 18th-century equivalent of the National Inquirer and paparazzi. Austen knew this world, and she makes references to it in her…
In The Myth of Liberalism , John Safranek observes that recent Supreme Court decisions identify freedom with autonomy: “both restrain the government from interfering with an individual's personal and self-defining decisions” (109). As the majority said in Casey , the right to self-definition is “at the heart of liberty,” such…
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