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Writing

Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.

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Biblical Studies

The Literary Structure of the Whole Bible

In this essay we will think about how the whole Bible is structured as one Word of God. To begin with, there is only one Bible, not two. While we divide the Bible into Old and New Testaments, that division has no more meaning than divisions into chapters and verse,…

by James B. JordanMay 16, 2019
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Catholicity

Catholicity and Integrity

How should one badly bruised and inadequate church relate to another? (I am not addressing the blessed possessors of absolutely perfect churches, naturally.) I believe there are three things to bear in mind. First, we must be open to the values in other Christian traditions - even Roman Catholic and…

by James B. JordanMay 14, 2019
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Chiasm

Fertile Meaning

The third and sixth day have a second creative act. Note the chiastic arrangement of the material in these special acts and the parallelism between them, see the figure below. The author arranges the description of each day as a chiasm. Each line in the chiasm is mated with a…

by Scott FairbanksMay 9, 2019
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Biblical Theology

Nakedness and Clothing

Now the two of them were naked, the man and his woman, and they did not sense shame (Genesis 2:25) The nakedness of Adam and Eve requires several comments. First of all, against those who think that nakedness is what God intended for humanity as a permanent estate, we have…

by James B. JordanMay 7, 2019
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Epistemology

Restoring the “Other” in Mother

I’ve been reflecting on the meaning of integration, and our longing for integration in a fragmented world. I’ve been connecting my own covenant epistemology further with the thought of scientist-philosopher Michael Polanyi, artist Makoto Fujimura, and Classical Christian metaphysician D.C. Schindler. In my last post , and now in this…

by Esther Lightcap MeekApril 30, 2019
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Hermeneutics

Go Tell that Vixen!

Luke 13:31-33 is one of the strangest passages in the Gospel of Luke. It begins with a time note that sounds emphatic “At that very hour.” Then, we are told of Pharisees bringing a message that Herod wants to kill Jesus! In His answer, Jesus speaks of a three day…

by Ralph Allan SmithApril 23, 2019

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Theology

Riches for the world

David Klinghoffer argues in his Why the Jews Rejeced Jesus that pagan Europeans would not have embraced Jesus if the Jews had not rejected Him: “If you value the great achievements of Western civilization and of American society, thank the Jews for their decision to cleave to their ancestral religion…

November 13, 2005

Nation of Rebels

A few quotations from Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter’s Nation of Rebels , which are all the more revealing because they come from men decidedly on the left of the spectrum (though, in their terminology, they belong not to the “ameliorative” rather than the utopian “transformative” left). “Consumerism always seems…

November 13, 2005

More on coffee

Marcus Rench of Cary, North Carolina, sent along the following quotations from H. E. Jacob’s Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity . Note that all these quotations are about coffee , not today’s expensive imitations - which will remain unmentioned - that allow people who dislike coffee to hang out…

November 11, 2005

Coffee

Jules Michelet said: “Coffee, the sober drink, the mighty nourishment of the brain, which unlike other spirits, heightens purity and lucidity; coffee, which clears the clouds of the imagination and their gloomy weight; which illuminates the reality of things suddenly with the flash of truth.”

November 11, 2005

Division and reunion

Some notes for a disputatio talk on church unity. Thanks to Rusty Reno for clarification at several points. It is evident in the text, and it is evident in church history, that there is good and bad union and good and bad division. 1-2 Kings explores the first of these…

November 10, 2005

Disfigured Israel

By my count, there are twelve disfigurements listed in Leviticus 21:18-20 that disqualify a priest from serving at the altar and in the tabernacle: blind, lame, slit, deformed, broken foot, broken hand, hunchback, dwarf, defect of eye, eczema, scabs, crushed testicles. The listed disfigurements point to a disfigured Israel, twelve…

November 10, 2005

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