Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
After Elijah’s battered and depressed howling in the wilderness it must have seemed like the new prophet came eating and drinking. Which is a pattern we see again in the New Testament—John is explicitly identified with Elijah (Luke 1.17, Matthew 11.14), howling the truth in the wilderness that the people…
Reading Robert Conquest’s biography of Stalin 1 has opened new lines of meditation on Paul’s command in Colossians 3:9. But before turning to that, let me briefly indicate what Paul is not saying. He is not saying that there is no such thing as righteous deception, such as Jael practiced…
You won’t find wild lions today in Israel. But lions used to range much more widely than they do now, and in biblical times they were a menace that shepherds in Israel had to contend with. David did as a shepherd boy, and Amos—who “ was among the sheepbreeders of…
I would like to remedy a flaw for English speakers in the book of Genesis. A flaw that may seem innocuous, but we must remember where the devil lives...in the details. If we are to fear the Lord, it behooves our translation committees to ensure that the fearfulness of God…
While reading at my son’s baseball game this week, a mom from our school approached me and asked if I was reading Dante. I wasn’t, but our sons are both reading Divine Comedy in their sophomore literature class, so it was a reasonable question. What unfolded was a quick conversation…
In the first two essays in this series, I addressed the question of how the nations would learn about Israel’s Torah, in the second essay especially emphasizing the aesthetic aspects of Israel’s testimony. For we naturally wonder: How would people in Mesopotamia or Egypt, not to mention the rest of…
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Alan Kerr ( The Temple of Jesus’ Body: The Temple Theme in the Gospel of John (Library of New Testament Studies) , 71) offers this comment on Jesus’ statement that Nicodemus had to be born of the Spirit before entering the kingdom: “It is almost universally accepted that Spirit here…
In his 1993 Word and Glory: On the Exegetical and Theological Background of John’s Prologue (Library of New Testament Studies) (79-82), Craig A. Evans lays out five parallels between the account of Moses’ intercession at Sinai (Exodus 33-34) and the latter part of the Johannine prologue (1:14-18): First, the general…
At the TLS web site , John Gray reviews Vladimir Tismaneanu’s The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century . Among other things, Gray highlights the continuities between Communism and Fascism. Soviet Russia disenfranchised “former people,” a designation that, according to Tismaneanu implied that they…
In a paper delivered at Princeton in 2012, Jennifer Herdt examines internal shifts in Reformed understandings of natural law enabled a merger between Reformed natural law thinking and “the modern natural law enterprise of the secular science of human nature.” The shift is several-fold. Calvin affirmed that human beings have…
Given the prominence of temple Christology in the New Testament, we’d expect to find it developed among the church fathers and medieval theologians. Athanasius develops Christology from this angle (Letter 60). The Arians, he says, “approve the former people [the Jews] for the honor paid by them to the Temple,…
The Economist is handing out year-end awards for wacky science, one of which goes to the team that published a paper on the trajectory of a falling Batman last summer. The Economist summarizes the findings, which are not encouraging for future Batmen: “if Batman jumped off a 150-metre-tall structure he…
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