Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I grew up in the 1950s. This was before the "Sixties" and the democratization, informalization, and general cheapening of the church and her worship. Ministers were Father Donovan, Pastor Eckhart, Reverend MacPherson, Mister (Episcopal) Parker, and Brother Smith. Liturgical speech was high language, sounding kind of like the King James…
Metaphor exerts a surprisingly powerful influence within our thinking. Although it is easily dismissed as little more than a figure of speech, when we attend more closely to the ways in which we use it, metaphor’s importance swiftly becomes more apparent. Although many of our metaphors have become quite invisible…
What is a tree, scientifically speaking? A mere googling gives the following answer: “a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground.” We can increase detail by describing its family, genus, species and…
The majority of Western evangelical Christians rarely, if ever, fast as a form of spiritual discipline. In our culture, fasting is more connected with dieting than worship, the other side of our deeply ambiguous fascination with food. Food is everywhere. We eat more than ever before, at greater speed, and…
A Grammar of Creation An understanding of the visual-musical language of the Bible must begin with Genesis 1. This is fortunate, because when explaining biblical types to academics, as opposed to children, one is repeatedly forced to start from scratch. From birth, a healthy child is attuned to rhythm and…
In an inverse Eden, a land laid waste, one works alone tending the trash. There are none like him in all the earth, inquisitive, playful and most drawn to those mysterious, dancing bipedal creatures who lost earth and left it to go wandering the vast wilderness of space. Humans have…
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More from Green’s commentary: Luke is amazing. In 7:1-10, Jews come to Jesus interceding for the centurion. They insist that the centurion is worthy of attention because he has done good to the nation of Israel: “He loves our nation, and it was he who built our synagogue” (v. 5).…
Building from Joel Green’s comments on Luke 7:1-10, I suggest a combination of chiastic and parallel structure in the passage: A. Centurion’s slave is ill, v 2 B. Centurion sends delegation of Jews, v 3 C. Jews convince Jesus the centurion is “worthy,” vv 4-5 D. Jesus responds by going…
Bailey’s discussion (previous post) also helped me to answer questions about the sexual imagery of Luke 7. Not only do we have references to “feet” (euphemistic for sexual organs), but the woman is said to “touch” him, which often has sexual connotations as well. Plus, the woman looses her hair…
There is a very intriguing analysis of Luke 7:36-50 in Kenneth Bailey’s Through Peasant Eyes . He points out that Simon the Pharisee must have invited Jesus to his house with the deliberate intent of insulting him, testing him. Simon left out all the basic rites of hospitality, which he…
It was one of those “blinding flashes of the obvious” that Jim Jordan often talks about (and apparently, experiences). I was asked the other day if the effort to formulate a thorough-going Trinitarian theology was an exercise of systematics, and if so how this fit with my bias (and that…
After reading through a stack of papers on Aeschylus’s Oresteian trilogy, a few thoughts have occurred to me, mainly having to do with my unbegun and doubtless forever unfinished work on the atonement, sacrifice, and so on. Essentially, these thoughts all boil down to one question: What would Aeschylus have…
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