Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
WHAT IS THE OT PRECURSOR OF THE NT OFFICE OF PASTOR? HOW DOES THE FORMER ILLUMINATE THE LATTER? The first problem to address is: how do we know that there is an office of pastor in the New Testament? 1 Perhaps the way the question is put may permit me…
[This essay was originally published in December, 1981, in The Biblical Educator , a publication of the Institute for Christian Economics, and again with slight revisions in Contra Mundum 7 (Spring, 1993). It is reprinted here as a supplement to my book Creation in Six Days .] In 1979, Dr.…
Anyone seeking to reverse the meaning of this promise needs to come to grips not only with the phrase "God was with the lad" later on, but also with Hagar’s response in 16:13. She worships Yahweh, putting her trust in Him and obeying Him. In fact, Hagar is at the…
Ishmael is the narrator of Melville’s fantasy-romance Moby Dick. Melville takes up the traditional view of Ishmael as a wayward son of Abraham, driven out solely because of the Divine "caprice" of election, an angry man with his hand raised against all other men. He is a fitting "anti-hero," or…
There were five cities at the center of the Canaanite culture in the circle of the Jordan, a place like the Garden of Eden, like the land of Egypt, before it became the Dead Sea at the destruction of the cities (Genesis 13:10). Genesis 14:2 tells us their names: Sodom,…
Meditations by James B. Jordan Genesis 19, the destruction of Sodom and the rescue of Lot, is part two of a story that begins in Genesis 18. These two chapters happen in one 24-hour period: noon and evening in Mamre, and midnight and daybreak in Sodom. God and two angels…
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The Bible speaks of children from beginning to end, the history it tells is a history of children. To recite the story of children in Scripture would be to recite Scripture. In the beginning: Adam was born of earth and divine breath, naked as a newborn. The protoevangelium is a…
"Modern" is an invention of the Christian Middle Ages. According to Krishan Kumar ( From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society ), " Modernus , from modo (‘recently’, ‘just now’) was a late Latin coinage on the model of hodiernus (from hodie , ‘today’). It was first used, as an antonym to…
The description of Solomon’s temple in 1 Kings 6 employs a number of anatomical terms: The temple has a “face” (v. 3), “ribs” (vv. 5, 8), and “shoulders” (7:39). The language makes it clear that already in the OT the temple is “humaniform.” We can be more specific: The “ribs”…
Craig Gay ( The Way of the (Modern) World ) lucidly traces a line of development from Descartes’ separation of the human subject from the world of objects, through the Cartesian and Newtonian effort to reduce science to mathematics, to the triumph of technical manipulation. At the end point, the…
The following is an excerpt from my Brightest Heaven of Invention , published in the misty days of the mid-1990s. Claudio looks at Hero’s appearance, and concludes she is a maid, a virgin. Because of Don John’s deception, he believes that he has peeled away the deceptive outer layer, the…
Kathryn Schulz observes that "One of the strangest things about the human mind is that it can reason about unreasonable things. It is possible, for example, to calculate the speed at which the sleigh would have to travel for Santa Claus to deliver all those gifts on Christmas Eve. It…
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