Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The resurrection stories in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are among the strangest stories in all of the literature of the world, even among the strangest stories in the Bible. That is true of each Gospel’s accounts individually, but even more of the collection as a whole. On the one…
As a pastor, I’m interested in discipleship. Christians are called to be disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ. Discipleship has everything to do with the disciplines we walk by in our lives. Things like Bible reading, prayer, and fasting are hallmarks of standard Christian discipleship. The basic thrust is that…
Psalm 1 is justly famous among biblical texts. It opens the Psalter, it’s a paean to the life-giving power of the Law, and it beautifully describes righteous life as a stable, fruitful tree. It subtly weaves the contrasting threads of wickedness and righteousness into a succinct summary of biblical wisdom:…
No book is more quoted in Hebrews than the Psalter: there are quotations and allusions to psalms on virtually every page. And many of the quotations are not passing references but closely considered and repeatedly cited as the author of Hebrews develops his central arguments. Much of Hebrews is exposition…
Howard Bloom is a beautiful hypocrite. The author of books in as different subjects as Mohammed, scientific theory, and the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, he professes to be a “stone cold atheist.” Yet in spite of that profession, Bloom obviously writes as a Jew; that is, he writes with…
There may be some debate about who deserves the title “the King of American literature,” but, at least to my mind, there should be no debate over who deserves to be “the Queen” – let’s give the crown to Flannery O’Connor. She is, however, a very unlikely queen. Unlikely, not…
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In a book written in the late 1370s, the surgeon John Arderne prescribed “the Bible and other tragedies” as remedies. These books were good sources, as Henry Ansgar Kelly explains in summarizing Arderne’s point, “for humorous stories of a good and decent kind that doctors can use to provoke their…
Barth defines faith as the “determination of human action by the being of the Church and therefore by Jesus Christ, by the gracious address of God to man.” While there may be weaknesses with this, there are several commendable things about the definition: 1) It does not polarize faith and…
If, as Barth says, theology NEED not be part of the genus “science,” why has it been so designated? It appears that the impetus is an effort to achieve precisely the things that Barth says it does NOT need from science. Barth says, “As regards method, [theology] has nothing to…
Barth quotes from J. Gerhard, who rejected the designation of theology as a science. One of his grounds was: ” scientiae certitudo ab internis et inhaerentibus principiis, fidei vero ab externis videlicet ab autoritate revelantis pendet ,” which in substance means that science derives its certainty from principles that are…
Jim Jordan has pointed out that the Greek word “oikoumene” is used in the NT to refer to the Hellenistic and Helleno-Roman world, rather than to the entire inhabited earth. It could be translated as “empire.” Against this background, the usage in Heb 2:5 is very striking, since it talks…
A discussion of death in the prefall world led to this thought: What was Adam supposed to do when a big dragon came to his wife and began tempting her to sin? I think he was supposed to do exactly what the Last Adam did: Crush the serpent’s head. But…
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