Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Pneumatology, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, is often formulated along dispensational lines. The Holy Spirit’s work in the Old Testament, we tend to think, was earthly, concerned with political and military leadership, while in the New Testament the Spirit’s work has to do with mediating salvation achieved by Christ.…
Homosexuality and the Love of Death Some years ago (September, 1980) Midge Decter published in Commentary one of the most illuminating pieces that I have ever seen on homosexuality. It was a very autobiographical piece dealing with her own summer vacation experiences on Fire Island off of New Jersey. When…
C. The Battle of Gog and Magog (Ezekiel 38-39) (continued for previous issue) A final corroboration of this interpretive hypothesis comes from what we might call the "Amalek Pattern" in the Bible. Note in Genesis 12-15 that Abram moves into the land after escaping Pharaoh (ch. 12), settles down and…
Speaking of the Church, Romans 11:16-17 says, "And if the root be holy, the branches are also. But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, being a wild olive were grafted in among them and became partaker with them of the root of the fatness of the…
But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching (tupos didaskales) to which you were committed, and having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness (Romans 6:17-18). In his study of the use of…
John Owen (1616-1683), Biblical Theology, or the Nature, Origin, Development, and Study of Theological Truth in Six Books, translated by Stephen P. Westcott (Pittsburgh: Soli Deo Gloria Publications, [1661] 1994), hardcover, 911 pages, $50.00. Here for the first time in English is one of Owen’s most important Latin works, along…
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W alter McDougall ( Promised Land, Crusader State , 4–5) divides the history of American foreign affairs into two testaments, summarized by the two phrases of the title. “Our Old Testament dominated the rhetoric and, for the most part, the practice of U.S. diplomacy from 1776 to the 1890s, and…
I n her TLS review of new books about Jane Austen, Devoney Looser comments on the irony that we think of Austen as a truthful, i.e., “factual,” novelist, a reporter of life as it was. In fact, “Austen's writings rarely fetishize facts. Her early foray into history writing famously describes…
T he Economist summarizes the notion of “information asymmetry” pioneered by George Akerlof and others. Using a used car lot a setting for a thought experiment, Akerlof showed (in a paper published in 1978) that the information asymmetry between buyers and sellers kills the market. Sellers can tell the good…
T he Wire is the best TV series I've ever seen. Also among the raunchiest. In an aside in an eccentric piece comparing the Fairie Queene to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit , Cambridge English scholar Joe Moshenska sketches an even more eccentric comparison of Spencer's poem to The Wire :…
L ike all right-thinking Americans, Emily Nussbaum is suitably horrified by Trump's election. But she grasps his appeal better than most. He won by being a better stand-up comic and shrugging off criticism by claiming he was just joking: “Trump was a hot comic, a classic Howard Stern guest. He…
I n her study of postmodern apocalypticism, Apocalyptic Transformation (xxiii–xxv), Elizabeth Rosen asks what effects secularization has on apocalyptic stories. The most obvious thing is a change in “how the deity is portrayed.” The perfect God of traditional theism is out; “secular deities are often imperfect characters, neither absolutely omniscient…
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