Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
[This essay was originally published in 1988. Given the situation that our new national socialists are getting the world into, I thought it might be useful to reprint it here. – JBJordan] The Bible has quite a bit to say about gold, silver, and precious stones, and the Bible always…
I wrote this elsewhere and was encouraged to put it here. It is a comment on what a pastor is. Today, this is not very well understood, and God’s people suffer because of it. There are four professions: medicine, education, law, and religion. Each of these, when done at a…
James Jordan recently pointed out in private conversation how appropriate it is, in John’s Gospel, that Nicodemus is present both to ask Jesus about being born again, and to see Jesus re-enter the womb of the mother. Nicodemus rhetorically asks, “How can a man be born when he is old?…
This is a problematic and much discussed passage. I’ve been discussing it in another forum, and have decided to move it here and present some very preliminary observations about it. One large question is this: Who is the speaker here and what is his situation? Traditionally, the speaker is seen…
1. The current issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction includes a good fantasy novella by John C. Wright, who since his conversion has been writing Christianly. This is a fine fantasy with nods to C. S. Lewis and Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and probably Gene Wolfe as well.…
“It is an experience of our days that the spoken name of Jesus alone exercises an unforeseen power; and the effort which it cost to speak this name is perhaps connected to some faint apprehension of the power which is inherent within it. Wherever the name of Jesus Christ is…
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In a 1980 article in the Journal of the History of Ideas Margret de Grazia helpfully described what she calls the “secularization of language” that occurred during the 17th century. Her contribution is to show that the often-noted “linguistic pessimism” of the century arose from the destruction of “the traditional…
Lori Branch links the Reformation and post-Reformation attack on ritual with the formation of the Cartesian self: “the Reformation religious subject gradually became less a participant in communal, bodily ritual action, and more and more the Cartesian cogito , an individual, inward-looking possessor of knowledge drawn from evidence and analysis.…
1 John 4:8 says that the one who does not love does not know God because God is love. This might be legitimately read as: God is love; knowing God therefore necessarily involves knowing love; therefore, the one who does not know love does not know God. But that’s not…
The Son is sent to be savior of the world (1 John 4:14). And it’s only as the only-begotten Son that He can be Savior. This is true in the usual sense that Jesus is the “contact point” between God and man. But it’s also true in a more subtle…
John uses the phrase “only begotten” ( monogenes ) four times in his gospel (1:14, 18; 3:15, 18). (I’m assuming here the controversial point that the phrase does mean “only begotten.”) He uses it only once in his first epistle: God’s love is manifest in the fact that “God has…
Commentators sometimes suggest that 1 John 4:1-6 marks a rupture in John’s argument. 3:23 speaks of love as a commandment of God, but there is no mention of love in 4:1-6, which discusses testing the spirits and the warfare between the Spirit of God and the spirits of the world.…
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