Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Abbreviated Introduction to the Series Scripture is absolutely dripping with animal metaphors. Animal traits, characteristics, and appearances are attributed to God, Man, Angels, Nations, Armies. Since animals are the lowest creature in the three-tiered hierarchy, they are useful to metaphorically focus on a single aspect of God (bold like a…
Many years ago, while perusing Janice Anderson’s revised doctoral dissertation, Matthew’s Narrative Web: Over, and Over, and Over again , I was impressed by her attention to literary structures of repetition within and across Matthew’s Gospel. 1 Her research, in part, nudged me closer toward my present conviction that Matthew…
Abbreviated Introduction to the Series Scripture is absolutely dripping with animal metaphors. Animal traits, characteristics, and appearances are attributed to God, Man, Angels, Nations, Armies. Since animals are the lowest creature in the three-tiered hierarchy, they are useful to metaphorically focus on a single aspect of God (bold like a…
“Like a lily among the thorns, so is my love among the maidens… My beloved is mine and I am his; he pastures among the lilies.” Song 2:2, 16 In chapter two of the Song of Solomon, the Beloved compares his Love to a lily among thorns. The language of…
Introduction From the very beginning, angels and animals have played mediating roles between God and Man. Just as the World was made three-tiered (Heaven, Earth, Deep), so the creatures were made (Angels, Men, Animals). Before Christ came to build the permanent bridge across the chasm between God and Man, various…
Matthew 13, the third major discourse of the apostle’s gospel, is comprised almost entirely of parables. While it may seem that all the parables serve the same purpose in fulfilling the prophet Isaiah (Matthew 13:14), the parables found in verses 44–52, at the very least, function outside that purpose. This…
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It’s a joke. It’s a comedy routine. Doom is coming! Doom doom doom! The world is ending, the kingdom is coming. Head for the hills, run, escape! The end is near! Repent! So says John, so repeats Jesus, like long-hairs with picket signs at the street corner. But then it…
How many Protestants are comfortable applying the label “righteous” to themselves? How many Protestants can sing or pray the Psalms with a clean conscience, appealing to the Lord to accept them because of their righteousness? How many Protestants instead experience an instinctive mental reservation when they speak of their justification?…
This is a gloss and summary of the overview I offer in my Brazos commentary on 1-2 Kings . Though the book is detailed and sometimes convoluted, the overall shape is neatly symmetrical. A. David and Solomon found the United Kingdom; Solomon builds a house. B. Jeroboam founds the Northern…
Ward Blanton’s Materialism for the Masses provides a rebuttal to Nietzsche’s claim that Christianity was nothing but pop-Platonism. On the contrary: Paul can be read as offering a “materialist spirituality” that has never been more needed than it is today. There’s something in that, though Blanton’s meandering book makes it…
Jesus was an ingrate. That’s on of the themes of Gratitude: An Intellectual History . Sign up now for the Theopolis newsletter, In Medias Res , and receive a free excerpt of the book. Fill out the simple subscription form here .
The army revealed by the sixth seal (Revelation 9:13-21) wears breastplates of “fire, hyacinth, and brimstone” (v. 17a) and breathes out “fire, smoke, and brimstone” (v. 17b), with which it kills a third of humanity (v. 18). Hyacinth is an anomaly on the first list, but essentially the army wears…
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