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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“In most of our scholarly literature about the classical world,” writes Columbia University’s William V. Harris in his Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity , “political and religious change . . . seems to take place in a remarkably calm fashion.” Harris doubts that this is…
So, What Are We Anyway? INTRODUCTION The liturgical changes recently introduced at Trinity might well provoke an identity crisis for members of the church. Have we become Lutherans? Or Anglicans? Or have we abandoned the Reformation altogether? Are we still Protestants? Are we on the road to Rome, Canterbury, Constantinople?…
1 Corinthians 11: the Lord Jesus in the night in which He was betrayed took bread; and when He had given thanks, He broke it. Division and reunion, death and resurrection, is the basic pattern of human life. Marriage is, as Pastor Wilson has taught us, woven into the fabric…
As Pastor Wilson will explain more fully in the sermon this morning, division is an essential part of creation. God creates by dividing light and darkness, by separating waters above and waters below, by drawing a boundary between sea and land. This creative division continues throughout Scripture, as God recreates…
Matthew 18:1-6 At that time the disciples came to Jesus and said, ?Who then is greatest in the kingdom of heaven??EAnd He called a child to Himself and set him before them, and said, “Truly I say to you, unless you are converted and become like children, you will not…
The following is a Christmas Eve homily, largely paraphrased/quoted from Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics , 4.1, pp. 185ff. John 5:30: ?I can do nothing on My own initiative As I hear, I judge; and My judgment is just, because I do not seek My own will, but the will of…
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