Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
If 1 Chronicles were a movie, it would begin with two hours and forty-five minutes of credits: Name after name scrolling across the screen, most of them (as far as we’re concerned) obscurities and nonentities and unknowns, forgotten fathers and sons and mighty men; all the bit players in the…
Let me locate myself. I’m sitting on a sand dune, three hundred feet above the blue-as-a-swimmer-crab water of Lake Michigan. I’m so high above the surface that the sound of the waves flopping onto the beach is as quiet as wind easing through a screen door. Around me are several…
My title is too grand. What I offer here falls far short of a full description of poetry. I barely offer a definition. A more accurate title would be “Axioms and Suspicions About Poetry.” Axioms first. I have three of them. The first is the closest I can come to…
In his book In Defense of Food Michael Pollan does just what the title suggests, he defends food. Pollan argues that the presupposition behind modern food science, or “nutritionism” as he calls it, is that humans don’t need food, they need nutrients. To be sure, modern science is not yet…
The early church took possession of the Roman Empire within a few centuries, largely because she ministered sacrificially in word and deed. The church provided services and care that the empire and pagan religions could not in times of crisis. The faithful witness of those serving Christians bore great fruit…
My title, “The Original Murder” will be understood by many readers, if not almost all, to refer to Cain’s murder of Abel, but I have in mind the very first murder, the one which Jesus pointed to when He said that Satan was a murderer “from the beginning.” “You are…
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The account of the interactions between Elisha and the Shunammite woman (2 Kings 4) includes several episodes, but it is a unified narrative, arranged as a modified chiasm: A. Shunammite woman prepares an upper room for Elisha, 4:8-11. B. Elisha promises the woman a son, 4:12-17 (“Call this Shunammite,” v…
There are some problems in Theodore Jennings’s Outlaw Justice (note my comments here ). But there are many, many insights in Jennings’s consistently political reading of Romans. On the Spirit’s intercession (135), for instance, he writes, that “the traditional translation, [the Spirit] ‘helps us,’ is, I think, flat wrong -…
The wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23). We hear that, and translate it into: “We do sinful acts; God punishes us with death; the ‘wage’ sin pays is death.” As Lloyd Gaston hints in Paul and the Torah , that doesn’t fit the way Paul uses the word “sin,”…
In his contribution to Galatians and Christian Theology , Oliver O’Donovan explores the flesh-Spirit opposition in Paul’s theology. He observes that flesh is associated with the law and with the elements, and glosses: “A moral law with multiple demands enslaves us. That is the truth of polytheism, explored long ago…
The locust plague that John sees coming from the abyss sounds like an army, chariots and horses rushing into battle (Revelation 9:9). Locusts that sound like chariots have appeared already in Joel (2:5), and the voice of horses is the voice of cherubim (Ezekiel 1:24; 3:13; 10:5). The locust horde…
There’s an enormous amount of chronological information in the Bible, but it is rare for Scripture to date an event by day, month, and year together. It happens at the completion of major construction projects, when worlds are completed - the world of the tabernacle (Exodus 40:17), the temple (2…
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