Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Part 1 We do not understand the role of women in ministry because we do not understand the role of men in ministry. We do not understand the role of men in ministry because we do not understand the church. We do not understand the church because the consumer culture…
1. One structure The Creation account (G1:1-2:4) conspicuously conveys meaning using the literary shape of the text. The narrative is told with formulaic patterns, repetitions, and parallelism. The Garden account is different. It is viewed as a separate text, with its own author, employing its own structure. This second account’s…
I was reading James Jordan’s Creation in Six Days while also preparing for Trinity Sunday in which the gospel reading is John 3:1-15. As providence would have it Jordan dropped an easter egg for me along the lines of baptism. In chapter 5 he points out, “ On the second…
It's true. There is no verse in the New Testament that commands or records an infant baptism. This poses a problem for some Christians. Those who only look for explicit commands, or those whose theology is limited to the New Testament, will conclude that infant baptism is not biblical and…
1. Goal This paper’s goal is to identify and describe a literary strategy employed by scripture, namely using two episodes that cover similar territory or themes using details drawn from opposite ends of a number of spectrums. Once described the reader may recognize numerous other instances of this strategy in…
Numbers 14 records the tragic story of Israel’s decision to rebel against Yahweh and Moses. Twelve spies had been sent into the land to bring back a report to Israel. All twelve spies agreed: “We went to the land where you sent us. It truly flows with milk and honey”…
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The numbering of the sealed in Revelation 7 alludes to the census events of the book of Numbers. There, Moses initially numbers men twenty years and older, mustering them as the troops that will conquer the land. (The second census, in Numbers 26, includes women and has a different focus.)…
The “personalist” understanding of the Trinity, articulated most influentially in the work of John Zizioulas, has fallen on hard times. Recent scholars have attacked Zizioulas’s idea that Cappadocian Trinitarianism represented an ontological revolution, hammering again and again the distinction between divine and human personhood. Michel Barnes’s conclusion is the most…
Protestant soteriology claims to deal with perennial patterns of behavior and belief: Striving for approval from God by our performance, self-righteousness, works-righteousness, pride in our achievements, etc. Let’s grant that these are perennial patterns of behavior, though they will likely take various forms in different cultural settings. That’s not just…
Theodore Jennings ( Transforming Atonement , 158) observes that “what is visible on the grand scale of imperial political history also lodges itself in the dynamics of quite small-scale communities, including those that may seem to be, and may think of themselves as, and may even in important respects actually…
Markus Barth ( Acquittal by Resurrection ) sharply raises the question of the justice of God’s verdict of justification. How can God pronounce the guilty innocent, the ungodly righteous? Barth raises the stakes by insisting that the justice should be evident to all: “If after the proclamation of a verdict,…
Over at the Theopolis Institute site , I offer some reflections on the liturgical formation of culture through a consideration of the biblical anatomy of human action.
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