Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I grew up in the 1950s. This was before the "Sixties" and the democratization, informalization, and general cheapening of the church and her worship. Ministers were Father Donovan, Pastor Eckhart, Reverend MacPherson, Mister (Episcopal) Parker, and Brother Smith. Liturgical speech was high language, sounding kind of like the King James…
Metaphor exerts a surprisingly powerful influence within our thinking. Although it is easily dismissed as little more than a figure of speech, when we attend more closely to the ways in which we use it, metaphor’s importance swiftly becomes more apparent. Although many of our metaphors have become quite invisible…
What is a tree, scientifically speaking? A mere googling gives the following answer: “a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground.” We can increase detail by describing its family, genus, species and…
The majority of Western evangelical Christians rarely, if ever, fast as a form of spiritual discipline. In our culture, fasting is more connected with dieting than worship, the other side of our deeply ambiguous fascination with food. Food is everywhere. We eat more than ever before, at greater speed, and…
A Grammar of Creation An understanding of the visual-musical language of the Bible must begin with Genesis 1. This is fortunate, because when explaining biblical types to academics, as opposed to children, one is repeatedly forced to start from scratch. From birth, a healthy child is attuned to rhythm and…
In an inverse Eden, a land laid waste, one works alone tending the trash. There are none like him in all the earth, inquisitive, playful and most drawn to those mysterious, dancing bipedal creatures who lost earth and left it to go wandering the vast wilderness of space. Humans have…
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Georges Canguilhem gives this illuminating description of Foucault’s episteme: “In order to perceive the episteme, it was necessary to exit from a given science and from the history of a given science; it was necessary to defy the specialization of specialists, and to try to become a specialist not of…
INTRODUCTION As the history of Israel begins to wind to a close, history begins to repeat itself. After the reign of Solomon, the united kingdom divided in two, Jeroboam established a separate kingdom, Rehoboam planned an attack but refrained because of a prophet, and Shishak of Egypt plundered the temple.…
Jehoash, pounding on the ground only three times, lacks the zeal to see the Lord’s wars through to their conclusion. He’s content with three victories over Aram, and is not willing to pound them until they are pulverized. He’s willing to leave the balance of power comparatively even. He doesn’t…
Elisha’s anger toward Jehoash seems unfair (2 Kings 13). He tells him to shoot arrows, and then pound them on the ground. How was Jehoash to know that pounding on the ground symbolized victory over Aram? Well, for one thing, Elisha told him that the arrow is the arrow of…
Joash of Judah is called “Jehoash” throughout much of his reign, but his name returns to Joash at the end of the account (12:19). Jehoash contains the name of Yahweh, and means “fire of Yah,” the fire of Yah’s wrath but also Yah’s fire of cleansing. Jehoash of Judah is…
2 Kings 13:23: But Yahweh was gracious to them and had compassion on them and turned to them because of His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and would not destroy them or cast them from His presence until now. As we say in the sermon this morning, this is…
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