Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
“We have a God who hides things because He loves to be sought out, chewed out and found out.” As Christians, we are rightly taught that we must not question God’s Word. The problem is that the Scriptures record many things which appear to have been given to us for…
The book of Revelation is a liturgy. John begins “in the Spirit” on the “Lord’s day” (1:10). Jesus appears, and Jesus tells him to record messages to seven churches, words of encouragement and rebuke, like the call to worship and confession at the beginning of a Christian liturgy. In chapter…
In my previous posts, I looked at the theme of creation as it is found in a sequence of psalms devoted to Yahweh’s Kingship (Psalms 93-100). Among other matters, these psalms declare that when the Kingdom of Israel’s God comes, it is the Kingdom of the world’s own Creator .…
The church in Corinth was a pastoral nightmare. Factionalism, sexual immorality, incipient syncretism, using the church as a stage for self-promotion, and denial of the final resurrection were just some of the problems. In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian church, he confronts each of these problems directly and in…
The first chapters of the Word of God have a poetic rhythm. This is used to discredit their accuracy as historical narrative, but the truth is that these same rhythms continue far beyond the book of Genesis. In fact, the later texts shed light on the frustratingly succinct account of…
Mr. Martian: What’s that there? Mr. Edison: (Edison holds up a standard, 60 watt lightbulb). It’s a lightbulb. Mr. Martian: A “lightbulb” you say? What exactly is a “lightbulb”? Mr. Edison: A lightbulb is an object used to illuminate a dark area, say a room. It’s made primarily of filament…
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Potter again: “Not all gods stayed at home. In the centuries after Alexander the Great’s conquest of Persia, eastern peoples appear to have been drawn west in greater numbers, possibly because new centers of power such as Alexandria and Pergamon made the Aegean lands far more important than they had…
According to David S. Potter’s superb The Roman Empire at Bay: AD 180-395 (Routledge History of the Ancient World) , there was no such thing as Roman grand strategy. In part this was a limitation of cartographical technology: “Roman surveyors had the ability to draw very detailed maps of small…
Job 2:7: So Satan went out from the presence of the LORD, and struck Job with painful boils from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. Job is a king. He is the greatest of the men of the east; later he says that he delivers…
After Jesus finished dictating the letters to the seven churches, the Apostle John looked up and saw a “door standing open in heaven” and heard a trumpet voice call out, “Come up here.” Since Adam was expelled from the garden, humanity had longed to return. Century after century, no one…
It’s hard to stop once you get a good ceremony going, Mary Beard shows in her 2007 The Roman Triumph . She notes that the last actual Roman triumph took place sometime between the fourth and sixth century but that didn’t stop imitators: “Renaissance princelings launched hundreds of triumphal celebrations.…
Thomas Mathews ( The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art (Princeton Paperbacks) ) claims that since the work of Kantorowicz, Andreas Alfoldi, and Andre Grabar, interpretations of early Christian art have been dominated by the “emperor mystique.” As summarized by Grabar, the theory is that the history…
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