Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Imagine driving up to Canada and stopping at a restaurant to get a bite to eat. While you’re sitting at the table, an enthusiastic young man comes over to you and says in an excited voice, "Are you an American?" You reply, "Yes, I am." "Wonderful! I have so little…
1 O Lord Almighty, God of our fathers, of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and of their righteous posterity; 2 You who have made heaven and earth with all their order; 3 who have shackled the sea by Your word ofcommand, who have confined the deep and sealed it with…
Part 1: 1When King Astyages was laid with his fathers, Cyrus the Persian received his kingdom. 2 And Daniel was a companion of the king, and was the most honored of his friends. 3Now the Babylonians had an idol called Bel, and every day they spent on it twelve bushels…
This debate has been going on for some time. But with few exceptions, almost all explanations of Presbyterian church polity claim that a “church” (meaning a single local congregation) must be ruled by “a plurality of elders” of whom one may happen to teach and work full-time doing so. This…
I hope that those who are advocating reading more of the ancient, "classical" literature of the ancient, "classical" world, are also promoting the Apocrypha. I’m afraid that many Christians don’t realize what great literature much of the Apocrypha is. It is not, of course, inspired by God, and perhaps because…
PRESBYTERIANISM is a term referring to a system of government in the Church. It is commonly contrasted with Congregationalism and Episcopalianism. Presbyter is a Greek word that is translated as “elder” in our English New Testaments. Thus, Presbyterianism is commonly defined as “rule by elders.” This is a misleading definition.…
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Tim Parks offers this depressingly familiar description of what it’s like to read today . “Every moment of serious reading has to be fought for, planned for. Already by the late 1990s, translating on computer with frequent connections (back then through a dial-up modem) to check email, I realized that…
Andrew Shepherd travels some ways with Levinas and Derrida in his The Gift of the Other , but like other critics he finds that Derrida and Levinas cannot finally support their ethic of hospitality and welcome. He cites David Wood’s criticism that Derrida’s notion of unrestricted, unbounded hospitality smacks of…
According to Eric Costanzo’s study of John Chrysostom’s theology of alms ( Harbor for the Poor ), John considered the judgment scene of Matthew 25 as “this sweetest passage” concerning God’s role in almsgiving and the place of alms in the church. Costanzo writes, “John used this text to illustrate…
Robin Parry’s Worshipping Trinity , now in its second edition, is a solid overview of Trinitarian theology and its implications for worship. He opens with an overview of the Trinity in Scripture and sums of Christian orthodoxy before turning to liturgical questions per se - to Trinity in prayer, song,…
Daniel Lewis goes bird watching, and bird watchers need to know their colors. Lewis is also an historian, so he got interested in how color terms came to be standardized. The work of another bird-watcher was decisive: “Other important color dictionaries were published at the start of the 20th century…
Partly based on the association of “Satan” with accusation in Revelation 12:10, commentators have widely taken the Hebrew word to mean “accuser” or “prosecuting attorney” throughout the Hebrew Bible. In a recent essay in JBL , Ryan Stokes questions that conclusion. Instead, he claims that the word means “adversary” and…
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