Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Christmas is a joyful season, but for many it turns into something else. Instead of joy, it is full of disappointment and unhappiness. Instead of an occasion for family fellowship, it becomes an opportunity for opening old wounds, reigniting old arguments, giving new life to rancor that should have died…
The Temple of Time The “covenant-literary matrix” of the Bible is not a pattern imposed upon the text, but the internal logic of its arrangement. This fundamental structure, functioning at multiple levels simultaneously, is a ceaseless reiteration of God’s primary theme. It is an algorithm forged in the furnace of…
In the four hundred and eightieth year after the Exodus, Solomon began to build the temple of the Lord in Jerusalem. [1] That the author of Kings should date the start of the building of the temple from the Exodus is noteworthy. In Exodus 15:17, in Moses’ song following the…
Philip Schaff, a German Reformed theologian, states in The Principle of Protestantism that the material principle of Protestantism is “the doctrine of the justification of the sinner before God by the merit of Christ alone through faith.” This is the core message of the Church which leads “to the abandonment…
“Religion” is an attempt to create or build a tower with a top, or to build a temple that is self-contained. The story of The Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 is the story of mankind’s attempt to create a world that is self-contained and does not need God. All…
In the first essay in this series, I presented a case for dating Matthew before AD 70, contrary to the present scholarly consensus. In this essay, I intend to present cultural, personal, ecclesiological, and theological arguments for a very early date for Matthew. [1] The cultural argument concerns literacy in…
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In Housekeeping , Marilynne Robinson observes through he narrator Ruth that absence is actually a more intense form of presence. As long as friends and family are physically empirically here, they are localized and circumscribed. Absent, memory finds them in every nook and cranny - a dead and beloved wife…
Jean-Luc Marion points out that “method” comes from the Greek meta-hodos, and explains why phenomenology is not methodological: “The method does not run ahead of the phenomenon, by fore -seeing it, pre -dicting it, and pro -ducing it, in order to await it from the outset at the end of…
Byron, a character in Arthur Phillips 2002 novel, Prague (set, of course, in Budapest), presents his theory of advertizing to “LWA’s” - Long Wolf Aspirants. Real Lone Wolfs, he explains, “don’t respond to advertising, but there aren’t more than a dozen of them on the planet.” But there is a…
Byron, a character in Arthur Phillips 2002 novel, Prague (set, of course, in Budapest), presents his theory of advertizing to “LWA’s” - Long Wolf Aspirants. Real Lone Wolfs, he explains, “don’t respond to advertising, but there aren’t more than a dozen of them on the planet.” But there is a…
Some reflections on a very stimulating lecture by Jeff Meyers on the Song of Songs at the Biblical Horizons Summer Conference. 1) Jeff pointed out that many modern commentators complain that allegorical interpretations of the Song “de-sex” it. But the intended effect is surely the opposite. Instead of purging desire…
The Lord’s Supper is a victory meal celebrated before the victory has occurred, as if Melchizedek has come out to Abram with bread and wine before the battle with the kings instead of after (Genesis 14). Traditional hymnody and certainly the Psalms likewise strike a triumphant note that clashes with…
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