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Writing

Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.

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Ezra

Ezra: The Aaronic Rest-Giver

If you’re a preacher looking for good commentaries on Ezra, you’ll struggle. Certainly to find ones that wrestle in good detail with the text. And certainly ones that don’t cost you an arm and a leg. There’s a good bit more for Nehemiah, which is odd, as the two are…

by Rhys LavertyJune 8, 2021
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1 John

1 John in Community

Quick thought experiment: try to pretend you’ve never read 1 John before. Read 1:1-6. Go ahead; I’ll wait. Now, on to v. 7: “But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with ______….” What word would you expect in that blank, based…

by Tim NicholsJune 1, 2021
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Hermeneutics

Spending Time with Noah: Reflections on Prepositions in the Flood Narrative

In my work as a Bible translator, I was recently checking our translation team’s draft of Genesis 8:8, which says of Noah (translating the Hebrew quite literally): And he sent out the dove from with him to see: had the waters lessened from upon the face of the ground? Part…

by Josh JensenMay 25, 2021
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Philosophy

Steven Weinberg Destroyed My Faith

Just in case a reader may not know Weinberg, he is a theoretical physicist and the winner of the Nobel prize in physics in 1979, as well as countless other prizes for his research. He is also a prolific, lucid, and captivating writer. If you want to read something on…

by Ralph Allan SmithMay 18, 2021
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Colossians

Reconciliation in Colossians 1:20

Colossians 1:15-20 is a famous passage in Paul’s epistles because it is a succinct and powerful poem. It appears even to have been a hymn. Given the uniquely Pauline language — “reconciliation” is a term used only by Paul — it should not seem odd to attribute the poem/hymn to…

by Ralph Allan SmithMay 11, 2021
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Movies

Terror of Knowing Myself

Stalker (1979) is a film by Andrei Tarkovsky based on Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers. It shows a day from the life of a stalker, a man who enters the so-called "Zone", an Alien landing site, where he leads people to a room that grants people’s innermost desires, which…

by Bogumil JarmulakMay 4, 2021

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Sacrifice in the Spirit

Christ’s life, says John Owen in The Death of Death in the Death of Christ , is entirely an oblation and a gift. Though “the perfecting or consummating of this oblation be set out in the Scripture chiefly in respect of what Christ suffered,” still Christ’s offering includes everything He…

April 10, 2013

Law and History

The fifth of Ralph Smith’s studies in Deuteronomy is available today at the Trinity House site.

April 10, 2013

D&D

In a wide-ranging review of the evidence in the TLS, Eric Naiman concludes that Dickens never met Dostoevsky, and Dickens never confessed to Dostoevsky what Claire Tomalin says he confessed. Tomalin cited a letter from Dostoevsky describing Dickens’s confession: “All the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even…

April 10, 2013

Justification as Acquittal?

NT Wright, following a long tradition, explains that justification is a declaratory act. It is a verdict of acquitted, cleared, vindicated in the view of the court. There is an immediate communal dimension to this: The acquitted person is “in good standing in the community as the result of the…

April 10, 2013

Where Are the Fish?

Various commentators suggest that the four living creatures in Revelation (ox, lion, eagle, man) represent the whole of animate creation joined to praise God. Which raises the obvious question: Where are the fish? You have a sky animal, a wild land animal, a domesticated land animal, and a man to…

April 9, 2013

Called to Beauty

Bruce Ellis Benson summarizes his opening argument in Liturgy as a Way of Life: Embodying the Arts in Christian Worship with this: “the fundamental structure of our lives is that of the call and response. That call and response can rightly be considered artistic in that we are - in…

April 9, 2013

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