Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Summary In what follows, I will consider the “year-stamps” employed in Scripture, i.e., statements of the form, “Such-and-such an event took place in the Xth year of Y.” In the process, I will suggest some ways in which the Biblical narrative might relate to events in the extra-Biblical world, though…
In the first essay on the parable of the Prodigal Son, I suggested that the problems commentators and others encounter in interpreting Jesus three-part parable are not accidental. These are not just problems in our ignorance of cultural background. They are intentional features of the stories —stories designed to poke…
The story of the Prodigal Son is perhaps the most well-known story in the Bible. As others have observed, it may also be one of the most misunderstood. In two short essays, I will point out features of this story that are commonly neglected, aspects of Jesus’ parable that might…
The parable of Lazarus and the nameless rich man is not an independent story. It is part of a long context that begins in Luke 15:1, where Jesus is eating with tax collectors and sinners and the scribes and Pharisees grumble. In response to their hardheartedness, Jesus tells a three-part…
The Bible is written so that even when a reader cannot pick up on what might be deeper or more detailed aspects of a text, there is virtually always a message to be heard. In the ancient world, where the “reader” of Scripture would likely be a church official facing…
The distinction between garden (or vineyard) and field begins in Genesis 2. This relates to the ordering of the formless world. Plants of the field are contrasted with the garden planted by God in Genesis 2:5&8. Later on, under the Old Covenant the Israelites will be required to keep their…
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According to Michel Foucault, what Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud introduce is an age of interpretation. He develops one of the implications of this by suggesting there is a “fierce war” between semiology and hermeneutics, between treating words as signs and treating them as interpretations. Nietzsche in particular, Foucault claims, develops…
Steven Marx’s Shakespeare and the Bible (Oxford, 2000), purports to be the “first book to explore the pattern and significance” of Shakespeare’s biblical allusions. Perhaps. The results are mixed. Each chapter of Marx’s book attempts to show structural, plot, and thematic parallels between a section of Scripture and a play…
Exploring Lake Superior in 1840, one Charles W Penny wrote, “We read the Bible I dare say much more than we would have done had we been in Detroit. Shakespeare was duly honoured, as he is every day when we travel. When on the water, some one of the party…
The Persons of the Trinity live out an eternal round of self-sacrificing love. If a proof text is needed, John 15 supplies it. 1) Jesus says, “as the Father loved Me, I have also loved you” (v. 9). Jesus’ love for the disciples is modeled on the Father’s for Him.…
John Stuart Mill declared at the beginning of his book on logic that “Logic is the common judge and arbiter of all particulars investigations. It does not undertake to find evidence, but to determine whether it has been found. Logic neither observes, nor invents, nor discovers; it judges.”
Hans Jonas writes in an essay on technological and scientific advance that one of the key cultural shifts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a, well, new understanding of “new,” and a corresponding revision of traditional ways of thinking about history: “A sign of this spreading mood is the…
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