Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
"Vanity of vanities", says the Preacher. "All is vanity". Life, we are told in the book of Ecclesiastes, is a repetitious, wearisome cycle; all that is and all that will be has already been. There is nothing new under the sun. What is crooked cannot be made straight, what is…
The Bible tells us that when God created the earth, He set up three zones of life. The first was the world itself. The second was the holy land of Eden. And the third was the Garden in Eden, God’s sanctuary. God told Adam and Eve that every tree was…
In our survey of Biblical chronology we have arrived at the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, which provide chronological information for the period after the return from exile, the Restoration Period of Old Testament history. The question we begin to address in this essay is whether the Artaxerxes of these…
These verses from the Sermon on the Mount are generally taken in connection with Jesus’ earlier statement concerning adultery in the heart (vv. 27-28); the eye and the hand have obvious relevance to the sin of adultery. At the same time, most commentators admit that the principle of avoiding occasions…
17. The eye that mocks a father, And despises to obey a mother, The ravens of the valley will pick it out, And the young eagles will eat it. 18. There are three things that are too wonderful for me, Four that I do not understand: 19. The way of…
The modern Church in America and virtually everywhere else is ideology-centered, not geographical. This is because various Churches believe different things and have different customs of worship and sacraments. The ideological Church has gradually developed from the time of the Reformation, because accuracy of doctrine has become more important to…
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In her recently-published Rituals of Spontaneity (Baylor), Lori Branch investigates the shift from ritual to emotional expression in liturgy, poetry, romance, consumer behavior from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. She asks, “How and why did the popular conception of poetry shift from ritual recitation and communal performance to the…
Helmut Thielicke says that Lessing cannot find the absolute of reason in the relativity of history because “history is an accumulation of the accidental and irrational.” Behind the epochal hermeneutical ditch between the truths of reasons and contingencies of history is a loss of any sense of providential history. Or,…
Helmut Thielicke says that Lessing cannot find the absolute of reason in the relativity of history because “history is an accumulation of the accidental and irrational.” Behind the epochal hermeneutical ditch between the truths of reasons and contingencies of history is a loss of any sense of providential history. Or,…
Lundin sees a link between (some) Protestant hermeneutics, Schleiermacher, and the quest of the historical Jesus. The common factor is a search for a pure origin: “In the nineteenth century the quest for scriptural purity and origins assumed a number of guises. In some quarters, it became the drive to…
Thanks to Tim Enloe for getting me a copy of David Rankin’s 2004 article, “Class Distinction as a Way of Doing Church: The Early Fathers and the Christian Plebs” ( Vigiliae Christianae 58). He examines the way the terminology and orders of Roman society were imported into the church. As…
Problems of communication are often explained in terms of the inherent limitations of language. But this, of course, assumes that the mind’s thoughts are whole, complete, and comprehensive until they have the misfortune to issue into the cold nasty world in speech and writing. But this, of course, is just…
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