Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
There’s something about joy that is infectious. And occasionally, we all have the opportunity to be in someone’s presence who is so happily engaged in their work, so joyous in their pursuits, that we want to learn from them. We want to know where that joy comes from and attain…
Jesus has told us that He intends all nations to be discipled. Nations. Not just individuals. All nations as theocracies. That being the case, the Church exists for the life of the world. Being baptized is not only a matter of becoming part of a new family, it is also…
Harold Bloom’s essay on Macbeth includes the kind of penetrating insights that make Bloom the great Shakespearean scholar that he is, but it also includes his typical and intense anti-Christian bias. “If Lear was pre-Christian, then Macbeth is weirdly post-Christian. There are, as we have seen, Christian intimations that haunt…
Revelation 16 is a day of atonement text. The tabernacle of the testimony has been opened (15:5). The angels who receive the bowls are clothed in linen (15:6), the clothing of the high priest when he goes into the sanctuary on the day of atonement (Leviticus 16:4). The temple is…
From time to time, when I’ve lectured on how to read the Bible, I’ve used art-music as one example thereof. When we listen to a simple folk song, we hear the same melody over and over again, but this is not how composers write "high" music. Let me amplify. A…
"For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea-monster, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (Matthew 12:40). Some reflections on Jonah’s Big Fish have led to the following essay. Let me…
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The word “Gethsemane” means “wine-press of oil.” It’s built from the same Hebrew root as Gath-Hepher, “the wine-press of the well,” a city in the tribal area of Zebulun, the birthplace of Jonah, and Gath-Rimmon, the “wine-press of the pomegranate,” a town in Dan. One of the five cities of…
God is, Barth repeatedly insists, as He reveals Himself. But Barth also hesitates about reading the relations expressed in the economic Trinity into the ontological Trinity ( Church Dogmatics , I.1, ch. 10). The relations as revealed are comprehensible, but these relations as revealed, precisely insofar as they are comprehensible,…
When Ewa Thompson joined the Indiana University faculty in 1968 as an assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Comparative Literature, Vietnam War protests were at their peak. A native of Poland, Thompson could not understand why Americans didn't unite against the Communists in Vietnam. Her first-hand experience with Communism, and…
David Goldman reports that “From 1977 t0 2005, business startups accounted for almost all economic growth and all net job creation. Established firms shrank and new firms grew. After the Great Recession of 2008, the opposite occurred: established firms accounted for all the recovery in employment, and startups contributed nothing…
The Mount of Olives is mentioned by name only twice in the Old Testament, and once it is alluded to as the “mountain east of Jerusalem.” When David abandons Jerusalem during the rebellion of Absalom, he travels east to the Mount of Olives, and then into the wilderness (2 Samuel…
According to Barth, when the decree loses its Christological focus, a gap emerges between a fundamental decree regarding predestination and reprobation and the “functional” decree to save in Christ. Christ becomes an instrument for carrying out that more basic decree, but He is not identified with the content of that…
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