Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Christmas is a joyful season, but for many it turns into something else. Instead of joy, it is full of disappointment and unhappiness. Instead of an occasion for family fellowship, it becomes an opportunity for opening old wounds, reigniting old arguments, giving new life to rancor that should have died…
The Temple of Time The “covenant-literary matrix” of the Bible is not a pattern imposed upon the text, but the internal logic of its arrangement. This fundamental structure, functioning at multiple levels simultaneously, is a ceaseless reiteration of God’s primary theme. It is an algorithm forged in the furnace of…
In the four hundred and eightieth year after the Exodus, Solomon began to build the temple of the Lord in Jerusalem. [1] That the author of Kings should date the start of the building of the temple from the Exodus is noteworthy. In Exodus 15:17, in Moses’ song following the…
Philip Schaff, a German Reformed theologian, states in The Principle of Protestantism that the material principle of Protestantism is “the doctrine of the justification of the sinner before God by the merit of Christ alone through faith.” This is the core message of the Church which leads “to the abandonment…
“Religion” is an attempt to create or build a tower with a top, or to build a temple that is self-contained. The story of The Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 is the story of mankind’s attempt to create a world that is self-contained and does not need God. All…
In the first essay in this series, I presented a case for dating Matthew before AD 70, contrary to the present scholarly consensus. In this essay, I intend to present cultural, personal, ecclesiological, and theological arguments for a very early date for Matthew. [1] The cultural argument concerns literacy in…
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In a footnote to the aforementioned article, Muller briefly discusses the medieval debates about the atonement. He points out that the medieval doctors stressed the passive obedience almost to the exclusion of the active; the active obedience was merely preparatory, making Christ acceptable or meritorious as a sacrifice. So, the…
I came across this from Mark Twain today: “History does not repeat itself but it does rhyme.”
I finally got my mitts on Richard Muller’s article on the Christology of Jacob Arminius (published in the Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiendenis , 1988). Here is a summary of some of the salient points. In the years leading up to Dordt, Arminius debated the Reformed theologians on both predestination and…
I finally got my mitts on Richard Muller’s article on the Christology of Jacob Arminius (published in the Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiendenis , 1988). Here is a summary of some of the salient points. In the years leading up to Dordt, Arminius debated the Reformed theologians on both predestination and…
Early in his book, Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World , Victor Zuckerkandl is contrasting the phenomenology of sight and sound, and says this about the Greek emphasis on the visual: “It seems more than mere change that it was among a people so deeply anchored in the…
In his brief story, “Ragnarok,” Borges tells a dream of an election taking place in the School of Philosophy and Letters that was interrupted by the coming of the gods. His description of the gods is wonderful: “A voice shouted ‘Here they come!’ and then ‘The Gods! The Gods!’ Four…
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