Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
1 Chronicles 9:1 seems to bring the genealogies of 1 Chronicles to an end. The Chronicler has recorded the genealogy of the human race from Adam, focusing on the descendants of Abraham through Jacob. Summing it all up, he says, “So all Israel was enrolled by genealogies; and behold, they…
The “personalist” understanding of the Trinity, articulated most influentially in the work of John Zizioulas, has fallen on hard times. Recent scholars have attacked Zizioulas’s idea that Cappadocian Trinitarianism represented an ontological revolution, hammering on the distinction between divine and human personhood. Michel Barnes’s conclusion is the most drastic of…
Biblical Theology is often defined as the historical unfolding of God’s revelation, or of God’s revelation and of the history of his covenantal redemption and transformation of humanity and the world. In practice, Biblical Theology is usually broader than this, and also includes the study of literary structure and of…
We are made to be happy. Created to enter into the eternal joy of God, our whole being inclines to that end, but the fallen world has put forth barriers and by our own sin we bar ourselves from that endless delight, and death blinds us to that reality. Yet…
At the end of Revelation, John sees the heavenly city descending to earth. The city shines with the brilliance of God's glory, which lightens the nations, so that kings bring their glory to the city. This is not a vision of the final new heaven and new earth. It's a…
“No one has ever seen God,” writes John (John 1:18). If this is the case, then how can we speak about God? Some people say we actually cannot. Or at least we cannot speak about God positively, i.e. who He is. We can only say who or what God is…
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The harlot of Revelation 17 is dressed like a priest - robes of blue and scarlet, precious stones, an inscription on her head. So is the bride of Revelation 21: She is a city adorned with precious stones with streets of gold. Why would a female city be dressed like…
In an aside, John informs us that the angel measuring the walls of new Jerusalem measures according to human measurements (measure of man), which are also angelic measurements (Revelation 21:17). One of my students, Kameron Edenfield, suggests that this is another indication late in Revelation that angels and humans have…
Rebecca Maloy’s Inside the Offertory: Aspects of Chronology and Transmission is mainly about Gregorian chant in the offertory, but early on she summarizes current opinion regarding the origins of the offertory. Contrary to some earlier liturgical historians, “A lay offering during the liturgy of the early church . . .…
Contrary to popular impressions, racial ideology does not constitute the center of Afrikaner nationalism, according to Donald Akenson’s God’s Peoples: Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster , a study of the modern afterlife of biblical covenant theology. Racial beliefs did not constitute the “central vaulting arch” of…
Revelation loomed large in the political conflicts of seventeenth-century England. On every side, the images of whore and bride were deployed to defend one church and condemn another. Una and Duessa in Spenser are one version of this battle. According to Esther Richey’s The Politics of Revelation in the English…
In her contribution to To Train His Soul in Books: Syriac Asceticism in Early Christianity , Susan Harvey describes how the “emergence of the ascetic single-sex household - and later its organized communal form, the monastery - appears to have brought a sea change in the (male) awareness of and…
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