Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
"Vanity of vanities", says the Preacher. "All is vanity". Life, we are told in the book of Ecclesiastes, is a repetitious, wearisome cycle; all that is and all that will be has already been. There is nothing new under the sun. What is crooked cannot be made straight, what is…
The Bible tells us that when God created the earth, He set up three zones of life. The first was the world itself. The second was the holy land of Eden. And the third was the Garden in Eden, God’s sanctuary. God told Adam and Eve that every tree was…
In our survey of Biblical chronology we have arrived at the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, which provide chronological information for the period after the return from exile, the Restoration Period of Old Testament history. The question we begin to address in this essay is whether the Artaxerxes of these…
These verses from the Sermon on the Mount are generally taken in connection with Jesus’ earlier statement concerning adultery in the heart (vv. 27-28); the eye and the hand have obvious relevance to the sin of adultery. At the same time, most commentators admit that the principle of avoiding occasions…
17. The eye that mocks a father, And despises to obey a mother, The ravens of the valley will pick it out, And the young eagles will eat it. 18. There are three things that are too wonderful for me, Four that I do not understand: 19. The way of…
The modern Church in America and virtually everywhere else is ideology-centered, not geographical. This is because various Churches believe different things and have different customs of worship and sacraments. The ideological Church has gradually developed from the time of the Reformation, because accuracy of doctrine has become more important to…
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Materialism is "good news," according to Stephen Greenblatt, since it shows us the truth of "human insignificance" and dispels enchantment. We're liberated from sacred boundaries to do what we like. Rusty Reno, who quotes this from Greenblatt ( Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society , 148) considers this a…
Paul Gottfried ( After Liberalism ) points out that liberalism doesn’t mean one thing. It “has not been allowed to keep any fixed and specific meaning. It has signified dramatically different and even opposed things at different times and places in the course of this century, from a defense of…
In his Lectures on Godmanhood , Vladimir Solovyev isolated the inner contradiction of 19th-century conceptions of human nature. On the one hand, "contemporary man is aware that he is internally free, deems himself to be higher than any external principle independent of him, asserts himself as the center of everything."…
Many commentators have noted the similarities between Josiah's death (2 Chronicles 35) and that of Ahab (2 Chronicles 18). Christine Mitchell argues, however, that commentators often miss the irony of the Chronicler's account, and some of the other precedents for Josiah's death. One irony has to do with the location…
Robert Heimburger's God and the Illegal Alien is a careful, theologically-informed treatment of American immigration law. He provides detailed overviews of the development of immigration law, including the origins of the concept of a legal "alien," sketches a theology of politics with the help of "Barth's biblical theology of the…
In his monograph on Aliens in Medieval Law , Keechang Kim notes that the distinction of citizen and "alien" replaced the earlier binary of "free" and "unfree" during the later middle ages. He cites John Fortescue's De laudibus legum Anglie (c. 1468-70), which argued that ""Hard and unjust (crudelis), we…
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