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Biblical Theology

Biblical Bestiary and Covenant Creatures, Part 3: Reunion of Man and Beast in Christ

Abbreviated Introduction to the Series Scripture is absolutely dripping with animal metaphors. Animal traits, characteristics, and appearances are attributed to God, Man, Angels, Nations, Armies. Since animals are the lowest creature in the three-tiered hierarchy, they are useful to metaphorically focus on a single aspect of God (bold like a…

by Jonathan WhiteOctober 27, 2025
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Matthew

Authority that Heals: Unpacking Matthew 4:18 – 10:4

Many years ago, while perusing Janice Anderson’s revised doctoral dissertation, Matthew’s Narrative Web: Over, and Over, and Over again , I was impressed by her attention to literary structures of repetition within and across Matthew’s Gospel. 1 Her research, in part, nudged me closer toward my present conviction that Matthew…

by Jonathan SedlakOctober 21, 2025
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Biblical Theology

Biblical Bestiary and Covenant Creatures, Part 2: The Animalistic Dehumanization of Sin

Abbreviated Introduction to the Series Scripture is absolutely dripping with animal metaphors. Animal traits, characteristics, and appearances are attributed to God, Man, Angels, Nations, Armies. Since animals are the lowest creature in the three-tiered hierarchy, they are useful to metaphorically focus on a single aspect of God (bold like a…

by Jonathan WhiteOctober 20, 2025
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Song of Songs

Like a Lily Among Thorns: Hailing the Suffering Christ in Canticles

“Like a lily among the thorns, so is my love among the maidens… My beloved is mine and I am his; he pastures among the lilies.” Song 2:2, 16 In chapter two of the Song of Solomon, the Beloved compares his Love to a lily among thorns. The language of…

by Mark BriansOctober 14, 2025
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Biblical Theology

Biblical Bestiary and Covenant Creatures, Part 1: The Shared Spirit of Men and Beasts

Introduction From the very beginning, angels and animals have played mediating roles between God and Man. Just as the World was made three-tiered (Heaven, Earth, Deep), so the creatures were made (Angels, Men, Animals). Before Christ came to build the permanent bridge across the chasm between God and Man, various…

by Jonathan WhiteOctober 13, 2025
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Matthew

Parables of Land and Sea in Matthew 13

Matthew 13, the third major discourse of the apostle’s gospel, is comprised almost entirely of parables. While it may seem that all the parables serve the same purpose in fulfilling the prophet Isaiah (Matthew 13:14), the parables found in verses 44–52, at the very least, function outside that purpose. This…

by David TownsendOctober 9, 2025
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History

Foucault’s eschatology

Berman offers this very sharp summary of Foucault’s work, whom he says is “about the only writer of the past decade who has had anything substantial to say about modernity” (Berman is writing in 1982). Then: “what he has to say is an endless, excruciating series of variations on the…

November 5, 2006
History

Flattened modernity

In the introduction to his All That Is Solid Melts Into Air , Marshall Berman argues that nineteenth century critics of modernity had a much richer grasp of the costs and promise of modernity than do twentieth century observers. Modern life is, Rousseau said, a whirlwind ( le tourbillon social…

November 5, 2006
History

Religious Liberty and the Whig Interpretation

The following is a portion of a lecture at the NSA disputatio. WHIGGISH HISTORY The Whigs were of course a loose British political alliance, the predecessor of today’s Liberal Democrats. The term was first applied, interestingly, to the Scottish Covenanters who marched on Edinburgh in 1648, and then to the…

November 3, 2006
American Religion

Innocent abroad

In a recent issue of TNR , Alan Wolfe reviewed David Kuo’s book telling the story of his service in the current Bush administration. Kuo worked in the office of faith-based initiatives, and though he left the administration he still praises Bush because of his Christian testimony. What strikes Wolfe…

November 3, 2006
History

World Cities again

Thinking again about Mike Featherstone’s comments on the fact that multiculturalism developed first in Southern Hemisphere cities (quoted in a post from September 2006), it strikes me that one of the dynamics of the current global situation is a reversal of colonialism. That’s true in the sense that Featherstone notes…

November 2, 2006
History

Mass culture

The point of theories of “mass culture” is not so much the “mass” as the “culture.” Goods and services may be distributed to a large number of people in economies where what is called “mass culture” doesn’t exist. When theorists use the phrase, they want to emphasize the fact that…

November 2, 2006

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