Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
My first title for this series of posts was “Evangelical Sacramental Ecumenism” – not exactly a clickbait title. But those three words, evangelical, sacramental, and ecumenical, say a lot: The centrality of the gospel; a focus on baptism, bread, and wine; and the quest for visible unity among diverse churches.…
I can imagine someone reading the title of this essay and saying to himself, "I have two questions. First, what in the world is “contextualization”?" Second, even before hearing the answer to the first question, he may wonder, "what does baptism have to do with such an awkward and vague…
Deuteronomy 21:18-21 My colleague Ralph Smith has recently written on this passage, here . I entirely agree with Ralph's thrust, which is typological, that the passage is ultimately aimed at the entire nation of Israel itself as the rebellious son. But what I am thinking is from another perspective, perhaps…
In the previous article in this series, I drew attention to the threefold meaning of the Spirit of God descending as a dove on Jesus at His baptism. On a related note, I also argued that 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 and Titus 3:3-7 were parallel passages that addressed the same issues…
The National Anthem protest is misguided. So too the conservative backlash. The Church’s response has been disappointing. I address each in turn. The greatest triumph of the American Civil Rights Movement was its seizing of the moral high ground in American politics. It did so by insisting only on those…
Peter Leithart’s book, The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism , argues that baptism is parallel to and the fulfillment of the old covenant rite of priestly ordination. But this is not something explicitly stated in the New Testament. Why, then, should we believe it? Leithart shows in…
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T he essays in Edward Alexander’s forthcoming Jews Against Themselves are an excoriating assault on Jewish “apostates”—Jews who, in the words of Maimonides, separate themselves “from the community” or “hold aloof from the congregation of Israel” and is “indifferent when they are in distress.” In Maimonides’s opinion, such no longer…
The TLS reviewer of Stephen Grant’s Collecting Shakespeare summarizes some of the intrigue, skullduggery, and determination that lie behind the creation of Washington’s Folger Shakespeare library: “During their long marriage, the diminutive couple (he was five foot four, she five foot) devoted themselves to collecting books, pictures and objects (relics…
“One could say that age is to time what place is to space,” says Robert Pogue Harrison ( Juvenescence , 3), and he’s surprising that with all the attention given by philosophers to time, so few make the connection with age. Even Heidegger, who understood time as “a kind of…
First there is only a tabernacle in the wilderness. Yahweh’s house, by itself, surrounded by a curtain. No priests live on the tabernacle grounds; the sanctuary is bounded off from everyone. By the time of Samuel, the little boy is sleeping in “the temple” at Shiloh. It’s still a tent,…
Winfried Corduan’s In the Beginning God is largely an effort to rehabilitate the reputation and theory of Catholic linguist Wilhelm Schmidt, whose 12-volume Der Ursprung der Gottesidee (1912-54) argued that monotheism was the original form of religious belief. As Corduan describes it, the “narrative behind the method” assumes that peoples…
I confess. I’m a sucker for books on the Trinity, and for books on the tabernacle. When someone combines these two topics in a discussion of the foundations of mathematics, as Vern Poythress does in Redeeming Mathematics , I’m hooked. Poythress has been busy redeeming nearly everything recently - Science…
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