Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Bruce Marshall once wrote that every young man who rings the bell at a brothel is unconsciously looking for God. While it is not necessarily true that the inward desire of every man is ultimately a thirst for righteousness, it is true that every sin is the disordering of a…
In a previous essay , I argued that the story which begins with Lot and culminates in Ruth’s great-grandson David follows God’s five-fold pattern of creative work as laid out by Jim Jordan: taking something in hand (in this case, the Abrahamic family), restructuring it, distributing the product of labor,…
Gilder, George. Men and Marriage. Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2023. 1 By 1973, the hightide of second-wave feminism had flooded the beaches of American culture. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique eroded the shores of traditional female roles by naming and stirring up further domestic discontentment. Kate Millet wrote her dissertation-turned-book,…
The Book of Job is a very tortuous book. The arguments of Job and his friends are shot through with truth and error hopelessly mixed together. Every line of contentious poetry stands locked in deadly battle with every other line. As maddening as this can be for a reader who…
More than once in the last 50 years it has occurred to me that Paul might have known Jesus before He appeared to Paul on the Damascus road, but I had never taken up the notion in earnest until recently when I ran into a book by Stanley Porter titled…
The question in the title is genuine, not polemic. I could be perfectly happy to follow an ancient — and what is regarded as a well-attested — tradition. But I do not feel compelled to follow it simply because it is tradition. I would like to have arguments that Peter…
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In contrast to other commentators, Stephen Smalley ( The Revelation to John ) doesn't think the “wrath” of God in Revelation should be understood as “the impersonal consequence of sin, worked out in history and disclosed at the parousia.” In Revelation and the rest of the New Testament, rather, “‘wrath'…
Adrian Daub and Charles Kronengold examine the James Bond Songs in a forthcoming book. It doesn't seem an especially promising subject; it's not the kind of thing you expect from the venerable Oxford University Press. But Daub and Kronengold show that the music is revealing in more ways that the…
Babylon is first mentioned in Revelation in 14:8, and is immediately associated with wine. It's called the “wine of the passion of her immorality.” That suggests a number of connections. The Song of Songs links wine with love: Love is better than wine, and the lovers drink each other and…
Drawing on Andrew Walls's idea of the “Ephesian moment” in world Christianity, Emmanuel Katongole notes that the coming together of different cultures into the church depends on a common table: “the expression and test of that coming together was the meal table: ‘two cultures historically separated by the meal table…
Three angels issue announcements in Revelation 14. The first angel is said to be flying in midheaven (14:6), the same phrase used for the eagle who appears after the fourth trumpet blows (8:13). Both speak with a loud voice (8:13; 14:7). The messages are somewhat contrasting: The angel announces three…
Scholars have doubted the coherence of this chapter, one calling is a “pastiche” of themes from other parts of the book of Revelation. In a brilliant article, Pieter GR de Villiers has presented a compelling structural analysis of the whole chapter. As a number of scholars have pointed out, chapter…
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