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Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.

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Biblical Horizons

2001: A Space Odyssey

In the November 1993 issue of Open Book Peter Leithart commented briefly on gnosticism. The film 2001 is a great specimen of gnosticism, and is worth viewing as a Sunday School project for an adult class. The author of the basic story was Arthur C. Clarke, an old-school science fiction…

by James B. JordanJanuary 6, 1994
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Biblical Horizons

Two Films by Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock’s earlier movies display a strongly moral, even Christian, point of view, and certainly can be enjoyed by Christian viewers. His later works, such as Psycho , The Birds , and his television series, are not as clearly moral in tone. In these later efforts, Hitchcock brought humorous or…

by James B. JordanJanuary 6, 1994
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Leviticus

Cult and Communication

“What art thou, thou idol ceremony?” asked Henry V during his midnight rounds of the English camp near Agincourt. His answer was that ceremony was both nothing and everything. It was nothing in the sense that it offered no guarantee that the king would be fit for office. Contrary to…

by Peter LeithartDecember 20, 1993
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Biblical Studies

Which Sacred Writings?

You, however, continue in the things you have learned and become convinced of, knowing from whom you have learned them; and that from childhood you have known the sacred writings which are able to give you the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. All…

by Peter LeithartDecember 20, 1993
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Biblical Horizons

The Production of the New Testament Canon: A Revisionist Suggestion

My research has led me to the conviction that there are three major periods of Biblical history, which lead to a fourth. These are the Ages of the Father, the Word, and the Spirit. The First Age, that of the Father, is recorded in the book of Genesis. It focuses…

by James B. JordanDecember 6, 1993
Exodus

Egypt in Biblical History

Both Bible history and the current consensus chronology of the ancient world are tied up intimately with Egyptian history and chronology. Thus, as we broaden Biblical Chronology beyond the matter of adding up numbers and try to integrate Biblical chronology with the ancient world, the place to start would seem…

by James B. JordanDecember 6, 1993

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Blessings of Business

D arren Grem's forthcoming The Blessings of Business is a study of the money men behind mid-20th century Evangelicalism. It's a revealing book, once one skims off Grem's premises, which seem to be: Evangelical ministry takes money, wealthy people provide the money. Grem seems to think this a scandal. It's…

June 13, 2016

Catholic v. Universal

W riting on Catholic education in a 1990 America essay , Walter Ong pushed the discussion of Catholic identity back to the roots: What is the “catholicity” of “Catholic”? “‘Catholic,'” he observed, “is commonly said to mean ‘universal,' a term from the Latin universalis .” But this doesn't fit the…

June 10, 2016

Philosophical Bible

W hy isn't the Hebrew Bible taken seriously as a text of philosophy, ethics, or political thought? That it isn't is obvious. As Yoram Hazony observes in his The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture , his graduate training at Rutgers all but ignored the Bible: “political theory and the history of…

June 10, 2016

Satan Among Skeptics

M ikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita has an epigraph from Goethe's Faust , and the novel is full of Faustian elements. Both involve temptation, the Satanic ball that Margarita attends resembles nothing so much as Faust's Walpurgis night, and the romantic overlay to a story of devilish temptation is…

June 10, 2016

Catholicity

I n an 1851 essay on “Catholicism” published in the Mercersburg Review , John Williamson Nevin unpacked the notion that the church is “catholic” or “universal.” He distinguished two ways of understanding the church's universality—as “all” or as “whole.” If the church is catholic as “all,” then it is an…

June 9, 2016

Outsider Ethics

W hile Athenian philosophy was in many respects quite distant from the political cosmologies that characterized the great Near Eastern empires,” writes Yoram Hazony ( The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture ), “it continued to develop their view of man as being essentially a creature of the state that governs him,…

June 9, 2016

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