Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
(continued from previous issue) Between 30 and 50 What did the Levites do between age 30 and 50? Numbers 4 shows us that they carried the house of God on their shoulders. Lifting up the Lord is an image of worship in the Bible, and David’s restructuring of the Levites…
When God created the world, He created two lands: the Throne-land of Eden (entered through the sanctuary-garden, the Garden of Eden), and the Outlying Lands, such as the lands of Havilah and Cush. This essentially bi-polar world is the world of the Old Creation, and it continued to exist until…
Color is inescapable, except for those who are color blind. In our church architecture, we either employ color schemes that are helpful to worship, or we employ color schemes that are not helpful. Of course, this assertion merely begs the question: What color schemes are most helpful. God showed interest…
As I noted in an earlier article in Rite Reasons , the Church Fathers Tertullian, Ambrose, and Augustine all claimed that baptism inducts the baptized person into membership in the royal priesthood of the church, and Thomas Aquinas said that baptism, by imprinting an indelible “character” on the soul, confers…
When the Aaronic priests were ordained, the blood of the ram of "filling” was placed on the lobe of the right ear, the right thumb, and the right big toe (Lev. 8:22-24). Similarly, the cleansing rite for a leper included smearing the right ear lobe, thumb, and big toe with…
In my Preliminary Commentary on Daniel , which many of you have obtained, I argued in chapter 13 that the four monsters called up from the sea by the evangelistic work of the four winds (the saints) represented the deep hatred of God that evangelistic work brings to the fore…
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Leviticus is the oilest book of the Bible. The Hebrew shemen is used 42 times (6 x 7); the closest competitor is Numbers, with 34 uses. The uses of shemen are clustered. Leviticus 2 uses the word 9 times, all with reference to the preparation of the tribute offering (…
Why do so many Egyptian statues have broken noses? Julia Wolkoff summarizes the answer of Brooklyn Museum curator Edward Bleiberg. Noses protrude, and so are more apt to be knocked off accidentally, but the pattern is too consistent to be accident. Erosion could account for some, but not all. Bleiberg…
Some snippets from Philip Turner's Christian Ethics and the Church . The premise of Turner's book is well summarized by a passage he quotes from Sabina Lovibond's Ethical Formation : "The ethical, let us say, pertains to what people learn to value through immersion in a community acquainted with ideas…
Levitical offerings send a "soothing aroma" ( reyach nichoach ) to Yahweh. Israel needs to produce good smells because her sin is noxious to Yahweh. When Israel rebels, His "nose burns." By slaughtering a substitute animal and turing it to smoke, Israel soothes Yahweh's hot nose. But that can't be…
“Spiritual reading” is usually associated with patristic, monastic, and medieval modes of reading. It's fruitful, however, to shift the focus and ask what the Spirit has to do with our reading. The Spirit is the enlivening breath of God, the water of God who makes us into a fruitful garden.…
Liberalism is "in origin primarily a refusal of ecclesial power." So write John Milbank and Adrian Pabst ( Politics of Virtue , 31). In refusing ecclesial power, early modern political theorists renounced the arrangement of Latin Christendom. The "first polity knowing no bounds and truly based upon the rule of…
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