Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Stories, frankly all human stories are practically always about one thing aren’t they? Death. The inevitability of death. . . . “There is no such thing as a natural death. Nothing that happens to man is ever natural, since his presence calls the whole world into question. All men must…
Matthew is organized around 5 discourses, which trace out the history of Jesus as a recapitulation of the history of God and Israel in the Old Testament. Jesus first speaks as a new Moses, instructing His disciples on a mountain about a righteousness that surpasses the righteousness of the scribes…
The fall of the Sethites in Genesis 6 is the third fall of mankind, or the third degree of Adam’s original fall. Adam sinned in a Garden against his Father by stealing something he was supposed to wait to obtain. (“Every tree shall be food for you” Genesis 1:29.) Cain…
The recent fantasy film Noah and a slightly related blog comment by my friend Douglas Wilson have stirred up again the question of whether the “sons of God” in Genesis 6 who married the “daughters of men” were fallen angels or the priestly line of Seth. Doug argues for angels,…
The prophecy of Jude concerns apostasy. An illustration of apostasy and its consequences is found in verse 6, which the New American Standard Bible translates this way: "And angels who did not keep their own domain, but abandoned their proper abode, He has kept in eternal bonds under darkness for…
At His death, Jesus is surrounded by a Roman centurion and his cohort of Gentile solders. Matthew doesn't say that any disciples are there. But women are, and so is Joseph of Arimathea, identified as a “disciple” but, as John tells us, a “secret disciple for fear of the Jews,”…
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L aura Horak's Girls Will Be Boys examines cross-dressing women and lesbians in early 20th-century American film. According to the TLS review , “The sheer number of cross-dressed girls/women and the instances of same-sex female desire that featured in the films of 1908-34 is staggering. (Horak unearthed 476 relevant titles,…
J oseph Bottum ponders why inductions into the Baseball Hall of Fame are so full of sepia-hued nostalgia. One reason has to do with the life-spans of baseball players: “football players are so short. . . . Great baseball players, by contrast, tend to have careers half again as long,…
W hen Saddam Hussein pushed into Iran in September of 1980, the US was in an ambiguous position. As Andrew Bacevich notes ( America's War for the Greater Middle East , 89-91): “As a practical matter, with the hostage crisis still ongoing and few Americans predisposed to sympathize with Iran,…
T he story of David's installation of the ark in Jerusalem can be told as a series of “outbursts” (variations of the Hebrew word paratz ; see Johnstone, 1 & 2 Chronicles , 169). In total, the verb paratz is used four times in chapters 13-15, and the noun “outburst”…
J ean Hani ( The Symbolism of the Christian Temple , 10) illustrates her concept of “vertical” cosmic symbolism with a quotation from Bonaventure: “Everything, in each of its properties, shows the diverse Wisdom, and he who knows all the properties of beings will see the Wisdom clearly. All the…
Mark Lindsay ( Barth, Israel, and Jesus , 27-28) notes that Barth found little intellectual companionship during his early pastorate at Safenwil. Yet, “his final years in Safenwil opened up occasions for contact with individual Jews and Jewish Christians at both social and academic levels. Many of these were Germans,…
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