Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Along His journey to Jerusalem, Jesus stops frequently to have meals, three times with Pharisees (7:37-50; 11:37-54; 14:1-35). Meals were central to Jesus’ ministry. He comes “eating and drinking” (Luke 7:34). While His meals are not just for refreshment, they are opportunities for teaching the protocols of the kingdom. Meals…
Time as a realm of participation can be difficult for us imaginatively to grasp. While music is a profoundly temporal art, exploring the medium of time like no other, most of our temporal experience seems decidedly unmusical in character, disjointed and unorchestrated. The form in which we naturally discover time…
John devotes much attention to Jesus’ burial clothes. He tells us that Nicodemus brought about a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes to spice Jesus body, and that He was bound in linen wrappings. We find out that His body and His head were wrapped separately. (John 19:39-40; 20:6-7). When…
Thinking about time in terms of music also helps us to appreciate its unity and inner relations. Henri Bergson observes our cultural habit of dividing time into discrete moments, and conceiving of these as if akin to objects in a spatial succession. [1] Against such a notion, Bergson argues for…
As we attend to these and other aspects of music’s temporality, Begbie suggests, we will find means by which to resist some of our habitual modern ways of conceptualizing time, most especially our tendency to conceive of time as if it were a homogeneous set of technologically quantifiable units laid…
The Hidden Dimension In many fields of scientific study, the apparent complications and contradictions are dispelled once the internal logic is perceived. Biblical hermeneutics is no different, since the author of Creation is the Author of the Word. The Bible’s literary labyrinth radiates organically from an algorithm so simple it…
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A couple of observations about the sin or purification offering, with implications for corporate dimensions of sin. 1. Leviticus 4 prescribes the rituals for the purification offering for priests (4:1-12), the congregation (4:13-21), leaders (4:22-26), and common Israelites (4:27-35) The introduction to the last category includes a grammatical ambiguity. The…
In the New Testament, hope is often “hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27). David Steindl-Rast ( Gratefulness ) argues that this hope links together our personal encounter with the risen Christ with the “power to transform even the social structures of our time.” Scripture fuses two conceptions of glory. In Hebrew,…
The seven speeches that described the tabernacle end with a reiteration of the Sabbath command (Exodus 31:12-17). The description of the actual construction of the tabernacle begins with a reiteration of the Sabbath command (Exodus 35:1-3). Building the tabernacle will establish a zone of Sabbath in the midst of Israel,…
When I pick up a book that Time calls “screamingly funny” and “intoxicating,” I'm poised to disagree, to find fault. Sometimes, rarely , I find the critics are right. I had that experience recently when I hurtled through George Saunders’s 2000 short story collection, Pastoralia . Pastoralia ’s stories are…
The description of the tabernacle in Exodus 25-31 is organized in seven speeches, each of which begins with “Yahweh spoke” or “Yahweh said.” After the golden calf incident, we read another description of the tabernacle, but it’s not organized in the same way. In Exodus 32-40, “Yahweh spoke” is used…
Even before Jesus was born, the Spirit is stirring, preparing the way for His coming. Gabriel tells Zecharias that his son John will be filled with the Spirit from the womb (Luke 1:15), and after John’s birth the Spirit loosens the tongue of Zecharias so he can prophesy (Luke 1:67).…
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