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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The point of Trinitarian theology is not simply that there are three instead of one. We can’t just plug our pre-conceptions about God into the Trinity, and say that now we are Trinitarian. We can’t assume Deism, the idea that God is a watchmaker who leaves the world to run…
. He There is often a gap between the popular perception of a philosopher’s teaching and his own conception of his teaching. But the gap in Berkeley’s case is particularly wide. On the one hand, there is his own professed plan to justify common sense and combat skepticism. He reiterates…
Joyce's Ulysses has a pendulum structure. JH Raleigh (in an essay in Joyce's Ulysses , 102) points out the contrast of filius and mater as these are the poles around which the action is organized: “solitary and single vs conjoined, both licitly and illicitly; homeless rover vs statonary huswife (husey);…
Paul begins the substance of the letter to the Ephesians by “blessing” God (1:3). As is well known, in Greek, verses 3-14 form a single long sentence, with one verb, “Blessed” (v. 3). This reflects a form of Jewish prayer, called the Berekah. It is not a request for God…
In his The Invention of Christian Discourse , Vernon Robbins explains how and why Christian discourse and rhetoric diverged from classical models. Ryan Leif Hanson summarizes the argument in Silence and Praise : “Classical rhetoric understands the basic social reality of persons as based in the Graeco-Roman urban environment. In…
Marilynne Robinson is a theological anomaly. A self-confessed Calvinist, admirer of Calvin and Edwards, defender of original sin and predestination (which, she says right, is not determinism), she is also a self-described liberal Christian who tends to take predictably liberal positions on moral and political question and to use sneering…
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