Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Christmas is a joyful season, but for many it turns into something else. Instead of joy, it is full of disappointment and unhappiness. Instead of an occasion for family fellowship, it becomes an opportunity for opening old wounds, reigniting old arguments, giving new life to rancor that should have died…
The Temple of Time The “covenant-literary matrix” of the Bible is not a pattern imposed upon the text, but the internal logic of its arrangement. This fundamental structure, functioning at multiple levels simultaneously, is a ceaseless reiteration of God’s primary theme. It is an algorithm forged in the furnace of…
In the four hundred and eightieth year after the Exodus, Solomon began to build the temple of the Lord in Jerusalem. [1] That the author of Kings should date the start of the building of the temple from the Exodus is noteworthy. In Exodus 15:17, in Moses’ song following the…
Philip Schaff, a German Reformed theologian, states in The Principle of Protestantism that the material principle of Protestantism is “the doctrine of the justification of the sinner before God by the merit of Christ alone through faith.” This is the core message of the Church which leads “to the abandonment…
“Religion” is an attempt to create or build a tower with a top, or to build a temple that is self-contained. The story of The Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 is the story of mankind’s attempt to create a world that is self-contained and does not need God. All…
In the first essay in this series, I presented a case for dating Matthew before AD 70, contrary to the present scholarly consensus. In this essay, I intend to present cultural, personal, ecclesiological, and theological arguments for a very early date for Matthew. [1] The cultural argument concerns literacy in…
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Jesus prayed that the church's unity would reflect the unity of the Father and Son. Paul urged the Ephesians to cultivate the virtues of peace that would express the sevenfold unity of the church (Ephesians 4). That demand is a perennial one. But we've been divided for a long time.…
Israel is a vine, transplanted from Egypt (Psalm 80; Isaiah 5). She exists to produce wine that gladdens the hearts of men. Israel is the Dionysian people. Ezekiel brings out another dimension of the vine image: “Son of man, how is the wood of the vine better than any wood…
The oracle of judgment in Ezekiel 14:12-23 is structured as a fourfold judgment: sword, famine, beasts, plague (v. 21). The descriptions of judgment are laid out in four paragraphs that use repetitive, stereotyped language. Throughout, Yahweh says that even the intercession of Noah, Daniel, and Job could not rescue Judah…
In a TLS review of several recent books on fairy tales, Fracesca Wade points to the political context and economic setting of early folk and fairy tale collections. Inspired by Herder, the Grimms, she observes, intended to recover Germanitas by study of natural German poetry: “Although the brothers drew widely…
In his Deja Vu and the End of History , Italian philosopher Paolo Virno explores the phenomenology of memory, especially in its relation to philosophies of history. The deja vu of the title isn't a metaphor; following Henri Bergson, Virno argues that it represents “the untrammelled extension of memory's jurisdiction,…
Paolo Virno ( Deja Vu and the End of History ) observes that potential and act occur simultaneously. Take language: “The language faculty irrupts into becoming in concomitance with the phrase that I am speaking. It appears precisely now, as I speak, neither before nor afterwards: but, note, right now…
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