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…
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S usan Hanssen describes Trump as an old-fashioned Whig. It's an intriguing history lesson, but I was especially taken by her conclusion. “If America is going to be rebuilt it will be rebuilt at the grassroots level, and that grassroots effort is actually going remarkably well,” Hanssen writes. What the…
I t depends on our concept of this universalism of the Christian religion whether we become narrow or broad in our ecclesiology,” wrote the Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck in an essay translated by John Bolt in the Calvin Theological Journal . How we relate grace to nature, re-creation ( herschepping…
M etaphor has had a good run for the past several decades. Philosophers, linguists, and literary theorists have renounced the reductive “classical” understanding of metaphor that treated it as an expendable adornment of the literal. Instead, we have discovered that metaphor is inherent in language itself, and even sets the…
Culture, writes David Goldman , is “inherently hostile to innovation. T.S. Eliot famously defined English culture as the regatta, the Glorious Twelfth, Wensleydale cheese, beetroot in vinegar, vestments, bishops, the music of Elgar — the minutiae of daily life accreted over generations. Culture is what does not change.” Yet there…
I srael's prophets excoriate the worship of Israel, in such terms that some commentators have concluded that they are attacking ritual as such. That cannot be, argues Dru Johnson ( Knowledge by Ritual ). Micah's answer to the question, “How shall I approach YHWH?” is not to counsel his hearers…
B oris Fishman celebrates the 50th anniversary of Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita at the NYTBR , a 50th anniversary that should be a 75th: “the author completed it in 1940, just as his own brief life was ending. But in the Soviet Union of the time—then concluding…
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