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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Ian McEwan’s Saturday is from one angle a novelization of Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” which also figures prominently (if improbably) into the plot. The book begins with neurosurgeon Henry Perowne looking out a window early on a February morning on a world where ignorant armies clash by night, and ends with…
I recently came across the work of Daniel Judah Elazar, a political scientist at Temple University who has devoted much of his working life to tracing the impact of biblical ideas of covenant on the development of Western politics. This comes out most fully in a four-volume work on the…
Holiness is separation, or so we are told. Let’s accept what we’re told. How then is God eternally and unchangeably holy? From what is He separated? If we say “the world,” then prior to the world’s existence God was potentially but not really holy. Of course, this can be resolved…
John Alvis suggests that in Hamlet, Shakespeare alligns himself with Machiavelli at least to the extent that he sees Christianity (or certain forms of Christianity) as a comfort to tyrants. Christians, Machiavelli says, are unresistant to tyranny because they have been taught to wait for the justice of God, to…
Despite the distracting use of the opposition of of “authenticity” and “responsibility,” Terry Eagleton has some thoughtful observations on the tragic dilemma in Hamlet ( Shakespeare and Society , 1967). Hamlet’s is a society of “reciprocal human definitions,” that is to say, a man’s identity is mirrored to him by…
Ephesians 4:15-16: Speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him, who is the head, even Christ, from whom the whole body, being fitted and held together by that which every joint supplies, according to the proper working of each individual part, causes the…
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