Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I grew up in the 1950s. This was before the "Sixties" and the democratization, informalization, and general cheapening of the church and her worship. Ministers were Father Donovan, Pastor Eckhart, Reverend MacPherson, Mister (Episcopal) Parker, and Brother Smith. Liturgical speech was high language, sounding kind of like the King James…
Metaphor exerts a surprisingly powerful influence within our thinking. Although it is easily dismissed as little more than a figure of speech, when we attend more closely to the ways in which we use it, metaphor’s importance swiftly becomes more apparent. Although many of our metaphors have become quite invisible…
What is a tree, scientifically speaking? A mere googling gives the following answer: “a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground.” We can increase detail by describing its family, genus, species and…
The majority of Western evangelical Christians rarely, if ever, fast as a form of spiritual discipline. In our culture, fasting is more connected with dieting than worship, the other side of our deeply ambiguous fascination with food. Food is everywhere. We eat more than ever before, at greater speed, and…
A Grammar of Creation An understanding of the visual-musical language of the Bible must begin with Genesis 1. This is fortunate, because when explaining biblical types to academics, as opposed to children, one is repeatedly forced to start from scratch. From birth, a healthy child is attuned to rhythm and…
In an inverse Eden, a land laid waste, one works alone tending the trash. There are none like him in all the earth, inquisitive, playful and most drawn to those mysterious, dancing bipedal creatures who lost earth and left it to go wandering the vast wilderness of space. Humans have…
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In the “Well, duh” category: After mentioning Warren Gage’s work on the parallels between Ruth and Tamar here earlier in the week, now I’ve read a student paper that helps to fill out that point. She points out that in both stories, men and specifically husbands die and that in…
Sermon Outline for Third Sunday in Advent: God With Us INTRODUCTION When John describes the incarnation, he uses an image drawn from the Pentateuch, saying that the “Word became flesh and ‘pitched His tent’ among us” (John 1:14). The phrase “pitch his tent” can also be translated as “tabernacled,” and…
Some interesting things going on in Paul’s quotation from Psalm 51 in Romans 3:4: 1) The surface significance is pretty clear. Earlier in the chapter, Paul has raised the question about how the PISTIS of God can be manifest if “some” in Israel have been APISTIA, so unfaithful to their…
Some speculations on death in the original creation, inspired by Jim Jordan’s lecture on Daniel 4 and by discussion with a colleague at NSA. As usual, anytime I write about the Trinity, Jeff Meyers is also lurking in the background. This is not all set in stone, only musings and…
Warren Gage of Knox Seminary in Ft Lauderdale is a treasure. In a very rich and as-yet unpublished paper on the typology of Samson, Gage points out a number of very striking typologies. He suggests, for instance, that Absalom is a Christ figure, dying on a tree, being struck in…
The editors of The New Republic got it right, it IS the correction of the year, issued by the Cleveland Plain Dealer on November 18: “Because of an editing error, a story on the front page yesterday misattributed a quote from the speaker on an audiotape purportedly of Saddam Hussein…
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