Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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In Numbers 12, Miriam and Aaron object to Moses’ Cushite wife. Miriam becomes leprous, is excluded from the camp, and restored on the eighth day. That is to say: The Messiah’s Jewish sister objects to the Gentile bride, and is cast out of the camp, but then she is cleansed…
Hicks again: He organizes his discussion of the New Covenant fulfillment of the sacrificial system in the phrases “life surrendered,” “life transformed,” and “life shared.” Reconciliation is made on the basis of life surrendered, blood shed, but that’s not the end point of the reconciling sacrifice. This enables him to…
FCN Hicks writes in his 1946 book on sacrifice that the burning of an animal on the altar was not destructive but transforming: “The offering is not destroyed but transformed, sublimated, etherealised, so that it can ascend in smoke to the heaven above, to the dwelling-place of God.” He cites…
Only God, Augustine argues in his treatise on music, acts on rational souls directly, “per seipsum.” Human beings operate on one another’s souls through intervening bodies, that is, through the words and other signs. God has arranged the world this way, he says, as a check on human ambition and…
Many translators and interpreters of Augustine’s de doctrina Christiana translate “signa data” as “conventional signs.” But there’s something to be said for taking the phrase literally (as some commentators do). The difference between naturalia and data, Augustine says, is that the latter occur by the will of a sign-user while…
Shakespeare recognized that something new was in the offing, but the actual situation of England and Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was far more complicated that Timon of Athens suggests. The gift-society to which Timon is attached was not being completely replaced, nor was the market the main…
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