Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The preceding essay has caused me to consider the possibility that the life of Abraham as recounted in Genesis contains a typological prophecy of the history of Israel; that is, that the events in Abraham’s life broadly anticipate events in Israel’s history. This kind of pattern is seen in the…
by: Jeff Meyers and James Jordan In the fifth chapter of John’s gospel we read of a man who had been ill for 38 years and who was lying by a pool located by the Sheep Gate of Jerusalem. This sheep waited, as did many other infirm people, for an…
What had been reduced to ruin by this sex, would by the selfsame sex be recovered to salvation. As Eve believed the serpent, so Mary believed the angel. The delinquency which the one occasioned by believing, the other by believing effaced. —Tertullian What is Paul saying about women and salvation…
Back in Biblical Horizons 132 I discussed the horrible abuse of the converted men of Salem/Shechem in Genesis 34. These Hivites had joined the covenant by circumcision and then were slaughtered by Simeon and Levi. That, however, is not the end of their story. In Joshua 9 we find the…
Genesis 14:14 says that Abram mustered his trained men, “born in his house,” to rescue Lot, and gives their number as 318. It is clear that the precise number is provided for some reason, but what is it? S. Gevirtz notes that 318 is the sum of all the prime…
Simon Peter went up, and drew the net to land, full of large fish, a hundred and fifty-three; and although there were so many, the net was not torn. (John 21:11) This is one of those texts in the Bible that many people puzzle over. It is not a puzzle…
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A few reflections on Barth’s discussion of the Trinity in CD 1.1, ch 10. Thanks to Joshua Appel, Josh Davis, and especially Toby Sumpter who clarified several of these points. 1) Barth insists that Trinitarian theology developed not as a qualification of monotheism but as a way of defending monotheism:…
Christians are committed to the notion that the margins may be the center: We believe that a stable in Bethlehem-Judah is the site where a new humanity is born; that catacombs serve as incubator for a renewed empire; that German barbarians are the wave of future civilization; that Africans might…
(This is the weakest part.) Postmodern historiography has rightly protested against this kind of bigotry. But in the process, postmoderns have apparently jettisoned the entire idea of a universal history, if not the idea of history itself. For postmoderns, to reduce humanity to a single unit is not only intellectually…
This is much weaker, but I think the argument is still clear enough. Of course, in central respects, this proposal calls for a revival of a project that dominated Christian historical writing from Eusebius to the Enlightenment. For Christian theologians and historians, all of human history was enclosed in a…
This is the first draft ( sans footnotes) of a paper I will deliver in January. The remainder of this draft will be posted on this site. To this day, schoolchildren in Sri Lanka learn about Buddhist ?doctrine?Efrom a Buddhist Catechism first published in English and Sinhalese in 1881. Described…
One premise of the above analysis is that Islam, which conquered some of the most vibrant areas of early Christianity, was and is a judgment of God, and therefore that Christians must recognize that Islam?s rise and continuing success results from the failures of the church. Laurence E. Browne concluded…
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