Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
One of the major themes of the book of Acts is that Christ’s servants follow in His footsteps. For instance, if we compare the lives of Jesus and Paul, we find that each engaged in several years of travelling and preaching. Each set his face toward Jerusalem. In each case…
(This continues a discussion of the Biblical and Assyrian chronologies, begun in earlier posts. You can click on the category, "Biblical Chronology," to see the previous posts. Was Ahab at Qarqar? Allis writes: "According to his Monolith Inscription, Shalmaneser III, in his sixth year (854 B.C.) made an expedition to…
I am not infrequently asked for advice on how to implement the kinds of things I’ve discussed in Rite Reasons and in my book The Sociology of the Church. To that end I’m providing in this essay some nuts and bolts that grow out of more than ten years of…
The first commandment given in the Levitical sacrificial legislation has to do with the animals appropriate to sacrifice: "When any man of you brings an offering to the Lord, you shall bring your offering of cattle ( behemah ), from the herd or the flock" (Lev. 1:2). Cattle alone were…
In the first week of November, the voters of the state of Washington were asked to approve or disapprove physician-assisted suicide. This has led to a good deal of comment on the issue of euthanasia in the press, and provokes the following reflections. 1. From a social policy standpoint, the…
We come this month to one of the most pernicious problems in the reconstruction of Ancient Near Eastern chronology, the problem of the Assyrian King Lists. We cannot proceed further with our survey of the chronology of the kings of Israel until we remove this roadblock from our path. We…
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Thanks to Jayson Grieser for sending along notes and quotations from Ramie Targoff’s 2001 Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England . Targoff points out that, contrary to what we might think, Protestants were more interested than Catholics in communal worship. “For sixteenth-century Catholics,” she writes,…
Calvin is harsher on allegorical interpretation than almost anyone, yet he is all in favor of typology. David, Zedekiah, Joseph, Aaron, Samson, Joshua, Zerubbabel, Cyrus and others are types of Christ. It is no easy task to discover where he draws the line between allegory and typology, though. At times,…
“Yahweh” is often thought to be a purely modern rendering of the Hebrew name, but Smalley finds a medieval glossator who writes the name as “Iahave.” She goes on: “The ‘monstrous form’ Jehoveh was already known to Christians in the late thirteenth century. Henry Crossy seems to compromise between Jehoveh…
Aquinas rejected Augustine’s dismisal of literal interpretations of the law as “absurdities,” arguing that “the end of the ceremonial precepts was twofold, for they were ordained to divine worship, for that particular time, and to the foreshadowing of Christ.” Applying this principle, he sought for a plausible literal interpretation of…
Aquinas rejected Augustine’s dismisal of literal interpretations of the law as “absurdities,” arguing that “the end of the ceremonial precepts was twofold, for they were ordained to divine worship, for that particular time, and to the foreshadowing of Christ.” Applying this principle, he sought for a plausible literal interpretation of…
Following Jewish exegetes of his time, Andrew of St. Victor interpreted Isaiah 53 as a prophecy of Israel. Isaiah used the phrase “man of sorrows” to speak “of the people as though of one man.” “Bearing infirmities” refers to “the people who were to suffer in the Babylonian captivity” and…
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