Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In the first installment of this essay, I offered the following chiastic outline of 1 Timothy: A. 1:1-2. Paul greets Timothy as a true child of the Faith, and blesses with grace, mercy, and peace. B. 1:3-7. Timothy is urged to command against heresy. C. 1:8-11. The reason the Law…
In the first installment of this essay, I offered the following chiastic outline of 1 Timothy: A. 1:1-2. Paul greets Timothy as a true child of the Faith, and blesses with grace, mercy, and peace. B. 1:3-7. Timothy is urged to command against heresy. C. 1:8-11. The reason the Law…
In the Bible, a memorial is something that brings God's promises and previous actions to mind, so that He can do them again. The rainbow is the model, set in heaven so that Yahweh remembers the covenant He makes with Noah (Genesis 9:13-15). God is light and dwells in a…
The First Epistle to Timothy fits neatly in the context of what King Jesus and the church are doing in the gospels, in Acts, Revelation, and all of the Apostolic Age in between. Paul writes to Timothy to encourage him in his work as a pastor in the “latter days,”…
I have been pastoring Cornerstone Reformed Church in Carbondale, Illinois since 1999. We are members of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), but have been practicing catholicity for many years, both personally and corporately. I’ve always believed that the Church of Jesus Christ is much more than the local…
Ecumenism is easy to talk about. It’s doing something to promote it that’s the problem. As a pastor in a town with churches of different denominations, all of whom love their doctrinal distinctions and are jealous to defend them whenever they perceive the slightest challenge, how can you be ecumenical…
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Stephen Mansfield remembers what Kurdistan was like in the early 1990s: “To be among the Kurds in the northern Iraq of those days was to be in the middle of a civil war while the troops of a tyrant amassed on a nearby border. Economic sanctions added to the general…
Rejoice when you are persecuted, Jesus tells His disciples, “for in the same way they persecuted ( dioko ) the prophets who were before you” (Matthew 5:10-12). Which prophets were those? The only prophet to speak directly of being persecuted is Jeremiah, who prays that those who persecute (LXX dioko…
Responding to a recent post on superheroes, a friend pointed me to this , where Betsy Phillips points out that Superman was invented by two Jews and modeled on Moses. Phillips writes: “Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster weren’t patterning Superman after Jesus. They were patterning him after Moses. A woman…
Haydn White argued that historical writing was disciplined as it moved from the sublime to the beautiful. As a result, modern historical writing is “domesticated” as it strips away all the tropes that lend themselves to the strange and terrifying possibilities of the sublime. In History and Tropology (15-16) F.…
Cherubim have four faces, similar to four creatures: ox, lion, eagle, man. In two passages in Daniel, all of these faces become faces of Babylon. When he falls from reason, Nebuchadnezzar pastures in the field like cattle, and his hair grows like eagle feathers (4:33). Three out of four: He…
At Politico , Nick Spencer argues that the possibility of atheism in the modern world, and the relative weakness of atheism in America, has less to do with science than with politics. Spencer writes, “‘Science’ - if we can treat that collection of disparate disciplines as one single, coherent enterprise…
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