Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Genesis 3 ends on a decisive, and decisively negative, note. Yahweh “drove the man out” of the garden, and, in addition, “at the east of the garden of Eden He stationed the cherubim, and the flaming sword which turned every direction, to guard the way to the tree of life.”…
When she died in 2005 at the age of 72, Anna Haycraft, the author who published under the name Alice Thomas Ellis, was a celebrated writer in Great Britain. While working at Duckworth Publishers(which her husband owned), she produced a dozen novels, a collection of short stories, a cookbook, volumes…
Some have suggested recently that my "project" is postmodern. To clarify my views on postmodernism, I'm re-posting something I wrote in 2005, with a few modifications. For a fuller discussion, you can check out my Solomon among the Postmoderns (Canon, 2008). First, it is helpful to distinguish, as many writers…
Calling Jerusalem the "holy city" comes so naturally to Christians that it comes as something of a surprise to realize how infrequently the phrase is used in Scripture. Not only is Jerusalem rarely called holy, but in the Old Testament this classification is found only in texts that refer to…
Asking why the church doesn’t sing hymns or even why men don’t sing in church is a bit like lamenting over the lame man who can’t waltz on the dance floor. While it is a valid question, the more immediate question would seem to be, “why doesn’t the lame man…
The theme of 1 Timothy is the distinction between the true children in the Household of God and false children who really belong to the household of Satan. This is seen in the fact that in the chiastic structure of the Epistle, heresy is the subject in the center (…
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W hen Jesus begins the Sermon on the Mount, He is sitting on a mountain teaching about the law. He is a new Moses; He is Yahweh. To get the full force of the analogy, we should recalled that God reveals more on Sinai than the Ten Word or moral…
Mark Kulansky observes in his Salt: A World History that “Almost no place on earth is without salt. But this was not clear until revealed by modern geology, and so for all of history until the twentieth century, salt was desperately searched for, traded for, and fought over.” Salt’s importance…
When we read of Jesus’ “disciples,” we naturally think of the Twelve. But that’s not nearly as clear as we try to make it. Many Bibles include the heading “the first disciples” for the episode in Matthew 4:18-22, but the text never uses the word. Peter, Andrew, James, and John…
In a classic essay on the “Symbolic Significance of Salt,” Ernst Jones neatly summarizes how the natural properties of salt lend themselves to social and religious uses: “Salt is a pure, white, immaculate and incorruptible substance, apparently irreducible into any further constituent elements, and indispensable to living beings. It has…
H ow, Walter Rauschenbush asked in his Theology for a Social Gospel , does Jesus bear our sins? Unsatisfied with “imputation” as an explanation, he turned to a “social” explanation. Jesus was in solidarity with humanity, and human history is a history of sin. Humanity is bound in a enslaving…
In her contribution to J ustification in a Post-Christian Society (52), Christine Helmer summarizes the work of Birgit Stolt, who has examined Luther’s vocabulary of justification: “Through careful linguistic analysis, Stolt shows Luther’s doctrine of justification is not couched in the sterile dogmatic vocabulary of a cognitive appreciation for the…
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