Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The preceding essay has caused me to consider the possibility that the life of Abraham as recounted in Genesis contains a typological prophecy of the history of Israel; that is, that the events in Abraham’s life broadly anticipate events in Israel’s history. This kind of pattern is seen in the…
by: Jeff Meyers and James Jordan In the fifth chapter of John’s gospel we read of a man who had been ill for 38 years and who was lying by a pool located by the Sheep Gate of Jerusalem. This sheep waited, as did many other infirm people, for an…
What had been reduced to ruin by this sex, would by the selfsame sex be recovered to salvation. As Eve believed the serpent, so Mary believed the angel. The delinquency which the one occasioned by believing, the other by believing effaced. —Tertullian What is Paul saying about women and salvation…
Back in Biblical Horizons 132 I discussed the horrible abuse of the converted men of Salem/Shechem in Genesis 34. These Hivites had joined the covenant by circumcision and then were slaughtered by Simeon and Levi. That, however, is not the end of their story. In Joshua 9 we find the…
Genesis 14:14 says that Abram mustered his trained men, “born in his house,” to rescue Lot, and gives their number as 318. It is clear that the precise number is provided for some reason, but what is it? S. Gevirtz notes that 318 is the sum of all the prime…
Simon Peter went up, and drew the net to land, full of large fish, a hundred and fifty-three; and although there were so many, the net was not torn. (John 21:11) This is one of those texts in the Bible that many people puzzle over. It is not a puzzle…
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In a 1980 article in the Journal of the History of Ideas Margret de Grazia helpfully described what she calls the “secularization of language” that occurred during the 17th century. Her contribution is to show that the often-noted “linguistic pessimism” of the century arose from the destruction of “the traditional…
Lori Branch links the Reformation and post-Reformation attack on ritual with the formation of the Cartesian self: “the Reformation religious subject gradually became less a participant in communal, bodily ritual action, and more and more the Cartesian cogito , an individual, inward-looking possessor of knowledge drawn from evidence and analysis.…
1 John 4:8 says that the one who does not love does not know God because God is love. This might be legitimately read as: God is love; knowing God therefore necessarily involves knowing love; therefore, the one who does not know love does not know God. But that’s not…
The Son is sent to be savior of the world (1 John 4:14). And it’s only as the only-begotten Son that He can be Savior. This is true in the usual sense that Jesus is the “contact point” between God and man. But it’s also true in a more subtle…
John uses the phrase “only begotten” ( monogenes ) four times in his gospel (1:14, 18; 3:15, 18). (I’m assuming here the controversial point that the phrase does mean “only begotten.”) He uses it only once in his first epistle: God’s love is manifest in the fact that “God has…
Commentators sometimes suggest that 1 John 4:1-6 marks a rupture in John’s argument. 3:23 speaks of love as a commandment of God, but there is no mention of love in 4:1-6, which discusses testing the spirits and the warfare between the Spirit of God and the spirits of the world.…
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