Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Stories, frankly all human stories are practically always about one thing aren’t they? Death. The inevitability of death. . . . “There is no such thing as a natural death. Nothing that happens to man is ever natural, since his presence calls the whole world into question. All men must…
Matthew is organized around 5 discourses, which trace out the history of Jesus as a recapitulation of the history of God and Israel in the Old Testament. Jesus first speaks as a new Moses, instructing His disciples on a mountain about a righteousness that surpasses the righteousness of the scribes…
The fall of the Sethites in Genesis 6 is the third fall of mankind, or the third degree of Adam’s original fall. Adam sinned in a Garden against his Father by stealing something he was supposed to wait to obtain. (“Every tree shall be food for you” Genesis 1:29.) Cain…
The recent fantasy film Noah and a slightly related blog comment by my friend Douglas Wilson have stirred up again the question of whether the “sons of God” in Genesis 6 who married the “daughters of men” were fallen angels or the priestly line of Seth. Doug argues for angels,…
The prophecy of Jude concerns apostasy. An illustration of apostasy and its consequences is found in verse 6, which the New American Standard Bible translates this way: "And angels who did not keep their own domain, but abandoned their proper abode, He has kept in eternal bonds under darkness for…
At His death, Jesus is surrounded by a Roman centurion and his cohort of Gentile solders. Matthew doesn't say that any disciples are there. But women are, and so is Joseph of Arimathea, identified as a “disciple” but, as John tells us, a “secret disciple for fear of the Jews,”…
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In Specters of Marxism, Derrida advocates a strongly eschatological Marxism but without committing himself to the specifics of a Marxist analysis of capitalism (must as he advocates a “messianism without messiah”). In both cases, he reaches for a formal structure without content, deliberately, because “content is always deconstructible.” Further, any…
One man sits and does nothing; and eats himself up. Another labors alone without end; and eats himself up. One folds his hands and refuses to grab anything; and his hands are empty. Another grabs whatever comes near with both hands; and in the end his hands are empty too.…
Surely Solomon believed there were absolute goods, or One Absolute Good, but he spends most of Ecclesiastes talking about relative goods. The Hebrew idiom tob . . . min (“good/better . . . than”) is used throughout chapters 4 and 7 to express the relative advantage of certain situations in…
Among all the books of the Bible, Ecclesiastes appears to come closest to the tragic wisdom of the ancients. But this is an illusion. Solomon warns that it is folly to say that the old days were better than the present (7:10), and encourages patience because “the end of the…
The fraternal conflicts between Israel and Judah foreshadow later conflicts between Israel and the true Jew, Jesus. And so, when the Northern Kingdom allies with Aram (its traditional enemy) against Ahaz of Judah, it foreshadows the alliance of Jew and Gentile against the great Son of God. Pilate and Herod…
The late Gillian Rose characterized the postmodern rejection of metaphysics as a triumph of social theory over philosophy, a triumphy that “re-enacts the earlier reaction, coterminous with the founding of modernity, according to which philosophy after Kant was ‘superseded’ by social theory . . . . It resulted in the…
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