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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I t seems a given, a truism, that architecture is about space. Ali Madanipour indicates otherwise. In his Design of Urban Space, he notes that the word rarely appears in architecture texts books, and observes that “the term is relatively new, in the context of the long history of architecture,…
R obert Joustra and Alissa Wilkinson want to help readers learn How to Survive the Apocalypse that seems to be looming. They see signs of apocalyptic agitation everywhere in popular culture—in Battlestar Galactica , a technological apocalypse in the film Her , a zombie apocalypse in The Walking Dead ,…
F irst Chronicles begins with nine long chapters of genealogy. Little is said about where these multitudes live. There are scattered hints of territory, but no elaborate description of the borders and boundaries of the tribes, as we find in the latter chapters of Joshua. The Chronicler attends only to…
N icholas Vazsonyi's Richard Wagner is subtitled “Self-Promotion and the Making of a Brand.” It's a study of the methods Wagner used to establish himself and his music as a brand: “creation of a persona, public relations, development of a niche and brand, marketing embedded in the theatrical works themselves,…
I n the mid-19th century, Princeton's Charles Hodge engaged in a public debate with the Mercersburg theologian John Williamson Nevin about the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. It was sparked by Nevin's book on The Mystical Presence , published in 1846, which Hodge reviewed in the Princeton Theological…
D ru Johnson's Knowledge By Ritual defends the thesis that we come to know—to recognize and to discern, to see rightly—through ritualized action. In the course of defending this thesis, Johnson devotes a few pages to explaining the biblical notion of truth. He points out that truth can apply to…
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