Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Paul writes to Jews, “You who abhor idols, do you rob temples?” (Romans 2:22b) The English translation “rob temples” makes readers think of pagan temples. There was only one Temple for Israel, so robbing more than one would indicate other temples are in view. And if the Jews wanted to…
Two offerings Humanity’s first vocation involves guarding and serving the trees that emerge from the ground (Genesis 2:15). God provides these trees to humanity for food. A serpent appears and tempts the couple to eat from a special forbidden tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Humanity…
At the outset of the Torah (as Christians understand it), a triune God creates the heavens and earth over the course of a seven-day week. Why? What’s the connection between the three and the seven? Could a triune God have created the world over any period of time he chose?…
How relevant to the modern reader are the flying axe head of Deuteronomy 19:5 and the roof parapet of Deuteronomy 22:8? Indeed, how relevant were they to the daily lives of Israelites thirty-five hundred years ago? Suppose that accidental falls from rooftops were exceedingly uncommon in ancient Israel, or that…
1 For most of my life, the standing of the American church as a source of national social and political order was measured by reports from the front of the so-called “culture wars.” 2 Memory brings to mind battles over feminism and the ERA, so-called gay rights, the breakdown of…
But when Herod died, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, saying, ‘Rise, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel…’ And he went and lived in a city called Nazareth, so that what was spoken by the…
Showing page 17 of 309
Showing page 5 of 43
David Klinghoffer argues in his Why the Jews Rejeced Jesus that pagan Europeans would not have embraced Jesus if the Jews had not rejected Him: “If you value the great achievements of Western civilization and of American society, thank the Jews for their decision to cleave to their ancestral religion…
A few quotations from Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter’s Nation of Rebels , which are all the more revealing because they come from men decidedly on the left of the spectrum (though, in their terminology, they belong not to the “ameliorative” rather than the utopian “transformative” left). “Consumerism always seems…
Marcus Rench of Cary, North Carolina, sent along the following quotations from H. E. Jacob’s Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity . Note that all these quotations are about coffee , not today’s expensive imitations - which will remain unmentioned - that allow people who dislike coffee to hang out…
Jules Michelet said: “Coffee, the sober drink, the mighty nourishment of the brain, which unlike other spirits, heightens purity and lucidity; coffee, which clears the clouds of the imagination and their gloomy weight; which illuminates the reality of things suddenly with the flash of truth.”
Some notes for a disputatio talk on church unity. Thanks to Rusty Reno for clarification at several points. It is evident in the text, and it is evident in church history, that there is good and bad union and good and bad division. 1-2 Kings explores the first of these…
By my count, there are twelve disfigurements listed in Leviticus 21:18-20 that disqualify a priest from serving at the altar and in the tabernacle: blind, lame, slit, deformed, broken foot, broken hand, hunchback, dwarf, defect of eye, eczema, scabs, crushed testicles. The listed disfigurements point to a disfigured Israel, twelve…
Showing page 1926 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
