Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In our first essay in this series ( part 1 ), we saw that Proverbs 30 opens with a puzzle, a cryptic sentence that challenges the reader to search out a matter in order to gain understanding. "It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, but the glory…
The story of Hezekiah’s illness and recovery is familiar to every child who has attended Sunday School. Informed that he would die, faithful King Hezekiah pleaded in tears for a longer life. God heard his prayers and saw his tears, and promised fifteen more years. As a sign that He…
1. The Blessed Hope "Looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus." Titus 2:13 I was recently asked how I as a postmillennialist would preach on "The Blessed Hope." This is often a sticky question, because postmillennialists believe that…
1. Jeroboam and Ahab After Solomon died, the people came to his son, King Rehoboam, and asked for tax relief. Rehoboam refused to give it, and indeed told the people that he was going to tax them even more severely than his father had. At that point, with the blessing…
One aspect of truth is unity. It was Truth Incarnate who prayed for the unity of His people in John 17, which certainly makes unity a priority for them as well. In one sense, we know by faith that the Church is always invisibly unified in Christ, but there is…
Mr. Paul Miller of Vancouver writes that he is not persuaded by my remarks on Luke 4 on " The Son of Joseph ." He calls attention to Mark 6:1-6, where Jesus came "to His own part of the country," taught in the synagogue, and astonished many. The people said,…
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R owan Williams ( Sign and Sacrifice ) summarizes the Anselmian understanding of the atonement using the categories of sacrifice, obedience, and gift, all set within a Trinitarian frame. It's quite lovely. Citing Hebrews citing Psalm 40, Williams argues that the Old Testament sacrificial system existed to symbolize the true…
D escribing the assignments of Levite gatekeepers, the Chronicler records that there were four at the “highway” at the western end of the temple, and two “at the Parbar,” which was also on the west (1 Chronicles 26:18). Scholars have proposed a variety of foreign etymologies for the term. From…
D enis McNamara's How To Read Churches is an extraordinary book. Subtitled “a crash course in ecclesiastical architecture,” it covers building types, floor plans, sections of churches (nave, apse, choir), materials, windows, altars, ornaments in 256, 6 x 6-inch pages, each of which is stuffed with pictures and diagrams and…
J ohn Milbank cites what he calls “Socrates's subversive realization” that “education can never be democratic” ( Being Reconciled , 182). This is in part because “the sheer singular uniqueness and contingency of wisdom is unable to subordinate itself to any majority,” partly because “if one is to learn, one…
T hrough a series of thought experiments, Richard Foley ( Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others ) develops a concept of rationality as “a matter of making oneself invulnerable to intellectual self-criticism to the extent possible, of living up to one’s own deepest intellectual convictions and standards.” Rationality thus “requires…
F ollowing Alvin Platinga, Richard Foley summarizes the principles of Locke's epistemology in three principles ( Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others ): Evidence (the “obligation to base one's opinion on one's evidence,” the latter defined as “what one knows with certainty”); appraisal (the obligation “to appraise the probability of…
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