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 discussion of God's transcendence, Jeremy Begbie ( Redeeming Transcendence in the Arts ) observes that some accounts of transcendence leave the impression "that language is something by its very nature that God would long to escape, that something so finite and susceptible to corruption could have no integral…
In his "Person" in Christian Tradition , Stephen Hipp notes that the "originality" of Cappadocian Trinitarian theology "lies in using the word hypostasis to designate the person in distinction from the substance. The distinction between hypostasis and ousia had not been instituted during apostolic times; the Greek Fathers are the…
William Hasker ( Metaphysics and the Tri-Personal God ) cites Carl Mosser's objection to social Trinitarianism's claim that the three Persons are "distinct centers of willing": "If the divine persons cannot differ because they necessarily act in concert with one another, then attributing distinct wills is superfluous. Attributing distinct wills…
Shannon Hayes is a different kind of feminist, a feminist who has not only broken from the patriarchy but from she views as a global capitalist system that buttresses the patriarchy. She is a Radical Homemaker . She explains that “Radical Homemakers are men and women who have chosen to…
William Mann has argued that when medievals identify God with His attributes, they identify Him with "property instances," specific individuals in a relationship of instantiation with the universals that they instantiate. Jeffrey Brower ("Making Sense of Divine Simplicity," Faith and Philosophy 25: 1 [2008]: 3-30) explains, "As Mann sees it,…
Robert Tombs ( The English and Their History ) observes that many intellectuals have pondered the character of nations for the past two centuries, asking "whether nations are ancient or modern phenomena; whether they have some organic existence as cultural, genetic or geographical entities; whether they are political and ideological…
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