Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
When I wrote my commentary on Ecclesiastes A Table in the Mist I took Eccl. 11:1-2 as a reference to the risk of international trade. It sure did seem to me like a reference to Solomon’s risky trade with other nations. Israel exported grain (bread) and Solomon’s ships returned to…
When we read an alphabetical psalm in English, we miss the fact that each verse begins with a new letter of the Hebrew alphabet. I have found one way to get around this, which is for the leader to announce something relevant about each letter before reading his half of…
How does the Lord’s Supper proclaim the death of Jesus until He comes? (1 Corinthians 11:26). Historically, liturgists have attempted to locate some act in the rite of the Supper that corresponds to the death of Jesus: the fraction (breaking of bread), or the fact that bread and wine are…
These notes are posted here by request. We all now live in the age of slob worship thanks to the “sixties.” I never experienced sitting for prayer until 20 years ago. Jesus was unhappy when His disciples could not watch and pray for one hour. Today’s slob Christians complain if…
On September 11, 2001, Jesus brought judgment upon the United States of America. Following His normal procedure, He used an even more evil force to do it (Habakkuk 1-3). The warning Jesus gives throughout the Bible to those He uses to punish others is that they need to repent, or…
Because of Donald Trump, the “Birther” issue is heating up. It is not going away, and is only part of a larger cluster of issues in regard to the President. Virtually all of the relevant documents concerning who he is and where he has been, have been suppressed, at great…
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What about taking “day of wrath” in Romans 2 as AD 70? Some arguments: 1) Dunn lists the verses that use similar phrases for “wrath and indignation” and “tribulation and distress,” and most of them are about historical judgments on Israel. There’s a cluster of uses in Deut 28:55ff, which…
Intellectualism and voluntarism both arise from the same theological error: from the assumption that there is some realm that is independent and autonomous. This is most obvious with intellectualism: For intellectualists, things have indepdendent value that God recognizes and evaluates. Voluntarists are, however, making the same error. They assume that…
Steve Studebaker writers in the Scottish Journal of Theology (56:3) about Edwards’s trinitarian theology, and includes an extended critique of Amy Plantinga Pauw’s treatment of Edwards’s incipient “social trinitarianism.” According to Studebaker, Pauw’s analysis only works if one assumes that the history of Trinitarian theology can be sketched out as…
In the same issue of JSNT, Philip Esler examines ancient oleiculture to illumine Paul’s use of the olive tree image in Romans 11. When he describes branches being grafted into an olive tree, Paul refers to a common practice. But the normal practice is to graft cultivated olive branches onto…
Jerome Neyrey has an interesting article on Acts 20:20 in the current issue of JSNT. He examines the cultural background to Paul’s use of the phrase “in public and from house to house” by examining various expressions in Greek and Latin writers that correspond to modern “public” and “private.” These,…
To what extent is modernity merely a recovery of the tragic? Tragedy, to my knowledge, simply didn’t exist in the medieval world. Drama revived late in the medieval period, but tragedy was reintroduced by the Renaissance. In Shakespeare, the tragic is set in a larger Christian comic setting, with profoundly…
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