Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Thus says the Lord: “A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more” (Jer 31:15). The Night of the Hunter belongs on every Christian’s Christmas list. My family has even…
One important part of Jesus's birth narrative is the presence of angels. The angel Gabriel appeared to the Virgin Mary, announcing that she would bear a son. And then, on the night Jesus was born, a whole host of angels appeared to the shepherds. Angels are mysterious creatures to us.…
I was settled nicely into my chair and listening to the conversation in an undergrad religion seminar, my last required course to graduate. Though a few Christians sat scattered around the room, the course itself was dedicated to poking holes in traditional understandings of the Bible: our readings deconstructed notions…
God’s symbols belong to Him and to His people. They are constantly at work in the world, including the world of film, music, painting, architecture, and other artforms. You cannot escape God’s symbols or the meaning He has woven into the created order. Artists use and borrow God’s symbols, whether…
For centuries, Christians identified Israel in the Old Testament as a single, literal ethnic group, often called “the Jews.” Even supersessionists – those who believed the Church superseded Israel – assumed the clear-cut, technical definition of “Israel” in the Bible is the ethnic group. However, a deeper dive into Genesis,…
Misreading Intent In the opening verses of Matthew 11, the reader is confronted immediately by John the baptizer who has been imprisoned since 4:12. John poses a question to Jesus, inquiring from prison as to whether or not he is Israel’s awaited Messiah or if they should anticipate another: “Are…
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Choon-Leong Seow has some helpful comments about the “time for this, time for that” poem in Ecclesiastes 3. He points out that the thrust of the section is about God’s control of times and portions. As evidence, he notes that the word “season” us normally used “of predetermined or appointed…
In his early work on Husserl’s treatise on the origins of geometry, Derrida highlights the critical insight that the objectivity and universality of geometric axioms depends, paradoxically, on their embodiment in writing. On the one hand, geometry is “there for ‘everyone.’” Yet, “how does geometrical ideality (just like that of…
Postmodernism, as I’ve indicated in previous posts, is many things, some of which are quite inimical to Christian faith. But in important respects, postmodernism - especially the thought of Derrida - is a Hebraic protest against Hellenized philosophy. In his fine recent book on Derrida, James KA Smith suggests that…
Bauman suggests that postmodernity, which is the “age of contingency fur sich,” is also the age of community. Yet, the communities that are possible within postmodern culture are inherently unstable; they are “clouds of communities”: “Such communities will never be anything like Tonnies’s cosy and unreflective (cosy because unreflective) homes…
The arguments in favor of skepticism were summarized by Aenesidemus in the first century B.C. in his Pyrrhonian Principles . Aenesidemus brought together the arguments under “ten modes” or “ten tropes,” helpfully summarized at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism-ancient/#LPA as they were stated by Sextus Empricus. The ten modes are reproduced below. (Mates refers…
Reflecting further on the pastoral applications of Solomon’s phrase “shepherding wind”: Every believer is born of the Spirit, and blows where he wills, and a pastor is in the business of shepherding wind. In this context, “quenching the Spirit” might refer to poor shepherding that tries to suppress the wind.…
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