Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
This year’s Biblical Horizons conference was another great success and we would like to thank all those who were involved by helping out with the catering or opening up their homes to attendees and speakers. The talks, open-ended as they were, offered a fresh perspective and food for thought on…
I find myself often rehearsing conversations with my children. When the house is quiet in the late evening, and I'm standing in front of a pile of soapy dishes, I think about what I am going to say to them in certain situations. When I am driving in the car,…
In Matthew 24:29 , Jesus employs “cosmic language,” signs in the sun, moon and stars, to predict the imminent end of the Old Covenant. His first-century audience would have recognized His allusion to the prophecy against Babylon in Isaiah 13 and understood His discourse as a condemnation of Jerusalem as…
The Enthroned One speaks to John (Revelation 21:6): “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give to the one who thirsts from the spring of the water of life without cost.” It's a little theology proper. For starters, there's the Greek version of…
In reading about how we got into this mess, I came across a very interesting couple of paragraphs that I think the church could learn from if we are going to counter the Obergefell ruling. Prior to 2009, same sex “marriage” had gone to the ballot box thirty-one times in…
In my previous essay on Macbeth , I pointed out that Shakespeare rewrote Scottish history to construct a play which points to Adam’s Fall — a man and a woman tempted by devils to steal the throne and become like gods. It is hard to imagine anyone in Shakespeare’s day…
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A central theme in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger is his critique of traditional conceptions of time. Aristotle is his bete noire . Aristotle defines time as a “number of motion,” which “inclines toward the quantitative, and so chronological sense of time as a sequence of ‘nows’” (D.C. Schindler, A…
Acts 8:1-4 records the beginning of Saul’s persecution of the Jerusalem church following the death of Stephen. It has a neat, nearly-chiastic structure: A. Saul in agreement with Stephen’s “taking off” (8:1a) B. A great persecution, scattering disciples (8:1b) C. Except the apostles (8:1c) B’. Devout men gather Stephen, with…
Anointing the sick, including the dying, is one of the traditional seven sacraments of the Catholic Church. The Reformers denied that the rite qualified as a sacrament. Formally, this was because anointing did not have a direct authorization from Jesus; more theologically, it was not one of the marks that…
The ordination rite for Aaron & sons is a ritual of taking and giving. At one level, that’s simply a basic linguistic fact. The verb “take” (Heb. laqach ) is used only five times in Leviticus 1-7, mostly with reference to taking blood to smear on the horns of the…
I first posted the following in August 2015, right at the start of Trump's primary campaign. Seven years on, it holds up - both as an analysis of why decent people enthuse over Trump and why they shouldn't. I've changed a grammatical infelicity or two and added an update in…
God is an event, writes Robert Jenson ( Systematic Theology, I , 221). “God is a person,” writes Robert Jenson, on the next page (222). How, Jenson asks, can He be both? Jenson’s rejoinder: How can He not be both? “What else could be a person?” A bit more elaborately:…
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