Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
There’s something about joy that is infectious. And occasionally, we all have the opportunity to be in someone’s presence who is so happily engaged in their work, so joyous in their pursuits, that we want to learn from them. We want to know where that joy comes from and attain…
Jesus has told us that He intends all nations to be discipled. Nations. Not just individuals. All nations as theocracies. That being the case, the Church exists for the life of the world. Being baptized is not only a matter of becoming part of a new family, it is also…
Harold Bloom’s essay on Macbeth includes the kind of penetrating insights that make Bloom the great Shakespearean scholar that he is, but it also includes his typical and intense anti-Christian bias. “If Lear was pre-Christian, then Macbeth is weirdly post-Christian. There are, as we have seen, Christian intimations that haunt…
Revelation 16 is a day of atonement text. The tabernacle of the testimony has been opened (15:5). The angels who receive the bowls are clothed in linen (15:6), the clothing of the high priest when he goes into the sanctuary on the day of atonement (Leviticus 16:4). The temple is…
From time to time, when I’ve lectured on how to read the Bible, I’ve used art-music as one example thereof. When we listen to a simple folk song, we hear the same melody over and over again, but this is not how composers write "high" music. Let me amplify. A…
"For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea-monster, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (Matthew 12:40). Some reflections on Jonah’s Big Fish have led to the following essay. Let me…
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This outline is the first for a series of sermons on “seasons of life.” Most of it is taken, shamelessly, from Jim Jordan’s wonderful study, From Bread to Wine , and from other things I have learned from Jim over many years. Galatians 4:1-11 INTRODUCTION The Old Testament is the…
Is the Green Knight in the Sir Gawain poem some kind of divine/Christ figure? Holly (green and red) is an emblem of Christ’s life-giving shedding of blood, and the Green Knight carries holly into Arthur’s court at the beginning. In fact, he becomes “holly” when he’s beheaded (blood on his…
This is an excerpt from a paper I have written for a discussion of the New Perspective for the Pacific NW Presbytery of the PCA: The NPP movement first began to take shape with the publication of Sanders?E Paul and Palestinian Judaism in 1977. The bulk of Sanders?Etreatise was an…
C.A. Bayly discusses the development of “imperial religions” and their globalization in his book on the Birth of the Modern World . He points out that the major world religions other than Christianity were transformed by their encounter with Christianity, and their response to that encounter. Of Hinduism in particular…
One of the issues currently being debated in the Reformed churches is the meaning of “grace.” Some have argued that the word should be restricted to specifically redemptive gifts and favors, which means that the word properly describes only God’s saving favor and gifts toward sinners. To say that Adam…
One of the issues currently being debated in the Reformed churches is the meaning of “grace.” Some have argued that the word should be restricted to specifically redemptive gifts and favors, which means that the word properly describes only God’s saving favor and gifts toward sinners. To say that Adam…
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