Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
After Elijah’s battered and depressed howling in the wilderness it must have seemed like the new prophet came eating and drinking. Which is a pattern we see again in the New Testament—John is explicitly identified with Elijah (Luke 1.17, Matthew 11.14), howling the truth in the wilderness that the people…
Reading Robert Conquest’s biography of Stalin 1 has opened new lines of meditation on Paul’s command in Colossians 3:9. But before turning to that, let me briefly indicate what Paul is not saying. He is not saying that there is no such thing as righteous deception, such as Jael practiced…
You won’t find wild lions today in Israel. But lions used to range much more widely than they do now, and in biblical times they were a menace that shepherds in Israel had to contend with. David did as a shepherd boy, and Amos—who “ was among the sheepbreeders of…
I would like to remedy a flaw for English speakers in the book of Genesis. A flaw that may seem innocuous, but we must remember where the devil lives...in the details. If we are to fear the Lord, it behooves our translation committees to ensure that the fearfulness of God…
While reading at my son’s baseball game this week, a mom from our school approached me and asked if I was reading Dante. I wasn’t, but our sons are both reading Divine Comedy in their sophomore literature class, so it was a reasonable question. What unfolded was a quick conversation…
In the first two essays in this series, I addressed the question of how the nations would learn about Israel’s Torah, in the second essay especially emphasizing the aesthetic aspects of Israel’s testimony. For we naturally wonder: How would people in Mesopotamia or Egypt, not to mention the rest of…
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The first way to honor the Passion as a mysterion , Jenson argues, is liturgical ( Theology as Revisionary Metaphysics , 132-3): “We understand the cross as our reunion with God when we ourselves are made actors in the cross’s story,” especially, he argues, in the three-day celebration of Pascha.…
One of Douglas Campbell’s essays in Beyond Old and New Perspectives on Paul deals the dikaio - language of Paul, both as a noun (righteousness, dikaiosune ) and as a verb (“justify,” dikaioo ). Addressing the latter, Campbell rightly highlights the importance of Romans 6:7: “whoever has died is justified…
The first thing that came on my computer screen when I clicked the link to look over Ethan Zuckerman’s Atlantic essay on the ad-based web was a pop-up. Oh, the irony! as my kids like to say. Zuckerman has been in the web industry for a couple of decades, and…
Cesarean sections have gotten a lot safer over the past century plus. And as they’ve gotten safer, they’ve gotten a lot commoner. But Sarah Yager reports that there are costs attached to the increase: “unnecessary C-sections cost insurers an estimated $5 billion a year.” And the cost of the procedure…
Jenson gives a concise summary of the weaknesses of traditional atonement theories ( Theology as Revisionary Metaphysics , 128-30). There are “two paired errors.” The first separates the cross “from its future, in the resurrection.” As Jenson says, without the resurrection, the “in the Bible’s general view of reality, a…
One of the themes of Andrea Gabriel’s summary of Barth’s Doctrine of Creation is that, for Barth, the doctrine of creation is a doctrine about God. This brings some fresh insights to the fore. It means, Barth insists, that “God” is not “synonymous with the concept of a world-cause, rightly…
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