Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I have never heard anyone say that the Bible is impractical, but I have heard people, after an in depth exegesis of a passage, ask for the practical application. Offer a class on childrearing, marriage, finance and the church members flock to it; offer a course on Leviticus, the visions…
Stones External and Internal The modern practice of dismantling the Bible into a shambles of documents authored in response to disparate historical events rather than viewing it as a unified testimony inspired by God is a surefire way to miss what is actually going on in the text. This failure…
King Asa of Judah made a strong start, purging the land of idols, altars, and images, and winning a war against the ginormous Cushite army led by Zerach. It all unraveled in his final years. From his thirty-fifth year to the forty-first year, when his reign came to an end,…
What appears to be Paul’s first recorded statement on justification comes in Acts 13, in a sermon at Pisidian Antioch. It's can serve as a summary of Paul's letter to the Romans, and throws some important light on the themes of that letter. Paul begins his sermon with a quick…
Iago as Tempter The answer to our first question — whether or not Othello is really great tragedy — has already pointed the way to the answer for the second question — Was Othello a noble Moor or a fool? The two questions, of course, are necessarily related. The fall…
When Adam McIntosh was ordained as Pastor of Saint David’s Church (CREC) in Houston on June 11, 2017, it was the culmination of decades of preparation. Adam is the product of two continents and three Christian traditions. Born in Paducah, Kentucky, he lived his early years partly in Jericho, where…
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O’Regan ( Theology and the Spaces of Apocalyptic , 113-4) deftly captures the limits and use of Derrida. Limits first, and there are severe: Derrida is not “adequate for Christian theology,” he argues, because “as theo -logy, there is presumtively a reality whose very nature it seems it to self-disclose,…
Christian reception of the work of Walter Benjamin is often set in the context of Christian reception of Jewish messianism or Jewish apocalyptic. In a brilliant summary of Benjamin, Cyril O’Regan ( Theology and the Spaces of Apocalyptic , 61-8) contests this characterization. Despite Benjamin’s claim that he is settled…
The Spirit is upon the Servant of Yahweh (Isaiah 61:1), and where the Spirit is, there is new creation (cf. Genesis 1:2). The mission of the Servant is fittingly described in a complex of seven infinitive clauses (vv. 1-3): A) Yahweh anointed Me 1) to proclaim good news to the…
The Servant of Yahweh is anointed to proclaim the “acceptable year of Yahweh” and the “day of vengeance of our God” and to comfort the mourners (Isaiah 61:2). These are not opposites. They proclaim the same fact from different angles, and the connection is underscored by a Hebrew play on…
The word “liberty” ( deror ) is rarely used in the Hebrew Bible, and the terms for its use are set by Leviticus 25, the laws of Jubilee. There, liberty includes the freeing of slaves, as whenZedekiah proclaims liberty to slaves (Jeremiah 34:8-16). But the specific liberty that is proclaimed…
Some months ago, I wrote a brief piece on the “tragedy” of conversion .I used the word “tragedy” in the sense I develop in Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, & Hope In Western Literature . The word describes a conception of history and metaphysics in which the original is by definition…
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