Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Introduction Isaiah 21 can only be understood in the light of its placement in the architecture of the second “volume” of the prophecy (chapters 13–27). The contents are arranged in twin sevenfold “columns” that represent the great bronze pillars of Solomon’s Temple: Jachin and Boaz, priest and king. The priestly…
A Biblical Reflection on the Purpose of the Constellations The starry heavens hold a place of wonder in the hearts of men. Since man’s creation we have looked up into the heavens and have beheld its glory. This is particularly true of the night sky. The stars, in their shinning…
The case for there being five discourses within the Gospel according to Matthew is a hard one to challenge: surely the closing formula “when Jesus finished these sayings” as found in 8:1, 11:1, 13:53, 19:1, and 26:1 settles it once and for all. And by the five instances of the…
The Long Commission The Great Commission of Matthew 28 has long been a cornerstone of American Evangelicalism. It has formed and fashioned the American church’s missional impulse. Yet when viewed from the wide lens of Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, the Great Commission is revealed as one of the pillars…
I am delighted to see that more and more churches in the Reformed tradition are now recognizing that all baptized children are members of the body of Christ and therefore ought to be communing with the rest of the body at the Lord’s Table. This has been decades in the…
Good leaders have always been rare. In today’s world, they seem extinct. Joe Rigney’s recent book Leadership and Emotional Sabotage digs into the spiritual reasons for the leadership epidemic and recommends cures. Rigney starts with a summary of a book by Edwin Friedman called A Failure of Nerve . Friedman’s…
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Sermon outline for this coming Sunday: A House That Stands, Luke 6:12-49 INTRODUCTION The Pharisees sought to renew Israel by applying principles of holiness and separation in every detail of life, such as table manners and how you spent your time on the Sabbath. Jesus agreed that Torah had to…
Here’s the same problem elsewhere in Barth (again relying on Hunsinger’s treatment): This encounter with God, he argued, was mediated, not immediate, and was given by grace, not by nature. The encounter was objectively mediated by Jesus Christ, and given only by the free decision of God. The condition for…
George Hunsinger describes one of the implications of Barth’s “actualism” in this way: Negatively [actualism] means that we human beings have no ahistorical relationship to God, and that we also have no capacity in and of ourselves to enter into fellowship with God. An ahistorical relationship would be a denial…
Joel Garver of LaSalle provided me with the following quotation from Jorge Luis Borges, a quotation that Joel read in a series of lectures on postmodernism this summer: Borges refers to a ‘certain Chinese encylopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor,…
I work on the assumption that all the attributes of God are Trinitarian, relational attributes. How does this work with an attribute like “holiness,” which, by most definitions, describes God as wholly un-related? The key is to notice that the language of holiness in Scripture describes things and persons claimed…
Why does biology start with the cell and work upwards? Why explain biological phenomena in terms of cell activity, rather than cell activity in terms of the activity of larger systems? No doubt there is experimental evidence to support this approach, but I find it prima facie doubtful. In many…
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