Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
To begin with the source of this narrative: Since no human being was present to observe these events, we must assume that this narrative was revealed directly by God to a human author. There are three ways this might have happened. First, we might read, "God said to Abraham (or…
The Empire Strikes Back is a movie most of us have seen more than once. It is generally regarded as the best of the three Star Wars films, which is probably due to the fact that unlike the other two, The Empire Strikes Back made use of the services of…
Now that we have examined three unacceptable approaches to the events recorded in Genesis 1, it is only fair for me to set out what does seem to be recorded there. To begin with the source of this narrative: Since no human being was present to observe these events, we…
Two books on the "Bible Code" have appeared this year. The first, a current bestseller, is Michael Drosnin’s The Bible Code (Drosnin, 1997). The other is Cracking the Bible Code (William Morrow, 1997), by Jeffrey Satinover, known to Christians for his outstanding 1996 book Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth…
Part 1: Introduction The collapse of the Western tradition in the United States, seen in the hostility to Christianity in government and education, and the elimination of "traditional" or "canon" learning from our institutions of middle and higher learning, provides a crisis and an opportunity for serious believers at the…
A Brief Defense of John Murray’s “the Free Offer of the Gospel,” & A Question About the Extent of the Atonement John Murray (1898-1975) is probably the last of the great American theologians; he belonged in the same set as that which contains such eminent Presbyterians as Charles Hodge and…
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W hen Jesus begins the Sermon on the Mount, He is sitting on a mountain teaching about the law. He is a new Moses; He is Yahweh. To get the full force of the analogy, we should recalled that God reveals more on Sinai than the Ten Word or moral…
Mark Kulansky observes in his Salt: A World History that “Almost no place on earth is without salt. But this was not clear until revealed by modern geology, and so for all of history until the twentieth century, salt was desperately searched for, traded for, and fought over.” Salt’s importance…
When we read of Jesus’ “disciples,” we naturally think of the Twelve. But that’s not nearly as clear as we try to make it. Many Bibles include the heading “the first disciples” for the episode in Matthew 4:18-22, but the text never uses the word. Peter, Andrew, James, and John…
In a classic essay on the “Symbolic Significance of Salt,” Ernst Jones neatly summarizes how the natural properties of salt lend themselves to social and religious uses: “Salt is a pure, white, immaculate and incorruptible substance, apparently irreducible into any further constituent elements, and indispensable to living beings. It has…
H ow, Walter Rauschenbush asked in his Theology for a Social Gospel , does Jesus bear our sins? Unsatisfied with “imputation” as an explanation, he turned to a “social” explanation. Jesus was in solidarity with humanity, and human history is a history of sin. Humanity is bound in a enslaving…
In her contribution to J ustification in a Post-Christian Society (52), Christine Helmer summarizes the work of Birgit Stolt, who has examined Luther’s vocabulary of justification: “Through careful linguistic analysis, Stolt shows Luther’s doctrine of justification is not couched in the sterile dogmatic vocabulary of a cognitive appreciation for the…
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