Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Thus says the Lord: “A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more” (Jer 31:15). The Night of the Hunter belongs on every Christian’s Christmas list. My family has even…
One important part of Jesus's birth narrative is the presence of angels. The angel Gabriel appeared to the Virgin Mary, announcing that she would bear a son. And then, on the night Jesus was born, a whole host of angels appeared to the shepherds. Angels are mysterious creatures to us.…
I was settled nicely into my chair and listening to the conversation in an undergrad religion seminar, my last required course to graduate. Though a few Christians sat scattered around the room, the course itself was dedicated to poking holes in traditional understandings of the Bible: our readings deconstructed notions…
God’s symbols belong to Him and to His people. They are constantly at work in the world, including the world of film, music, painting, architecture, and other artforms. You cannot escape God’s symbols or the meaning He has woven into the created order. Artists use and borrow God’s symbols, whether…
For centuries, Christians identified Israel in the Old Testament as a single, literal ethnic group, often called “the Jews.” Even supersessionists – those who believed the Church superseded Israel – assumed the clear-cut, technical definition of “Israel” in the Bible is the ethnic group. However, a deeper dive into Genesis,…
Misreading Intent In the opening verses of Matthew 11, the reader is confronted immediately by John the baptizer who has been imprisoned since 4:12. John poses a question to Jesus, inquiring from prison as to whether or not he is Israel’s awaited Messiah or if they should anticipate another: “Are…
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Isaiah 49 is reassurance to Zion that Yahweh has not forgotten her. Her walls are continuously ( tamid ) before Yahweh, like the sacrifices and showbread (v. 16). And Yahweh goes beyond the assurance of His concern to promise that Zion will be surrounded by gathered people, returned exiles and…
The Hebrew of Isaiah 49:17 is beautifully symmetrical. Transliterated, it reads: miharu banayik meharsayik umacharivayik mimmek yetze’u . The endings of the six words form a neat pattern: one - u followed by four words ending with the second person singular pronomial suffix ( k ), and then another -…
The Hebrew word beten frequently means “womb” (Genesis 25:23; Number 5:22; Psalm 22:9-10; 71:6; Jeremiah 1:5). In a few instances, though, the word is used in unusual contexts. When Yahweh offers Ezekiel a scroll to eat, He orders him to eat it with his beten and to fill his “bowels”…
God has no needs. Philo, Seneca, and classic Christian theology agree on that. But I think the explanation differs. Seneca ( On Benefits (The Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca) , bk. 4) explains that “God bestows upon us very many and very great benefits, with no thought of any…
The Christian conviction that Jesus had defeated the powers and brought an end to old rites had major effects on early Christian social engagement, Gary Ferngren implies in his 2009 Medicine and Health Care in Early Christianity . “Before the advent of Christianity,” he says, “there was no concept of…
For all its reputation for iconoclasm, modernism, says Robert Alter in Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture (The Franz Rosenzweig Lecture Series) , is more accurately described as a “paradoxical amalgam of iconoclasm and hypertraditionalism” (p. 8). Alter’s book explores this phenomenon, along with the “double…
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