Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
21. Under three things the earth quakes. And under four, it cannot bear up. 22. Under a slave when he becomes king, And a fool when he is satisfied with food, 23. Under an odious woman when she gets a husband, And a maidservant when she supplants her mistress. The…
We have looked at the prima facie evidence for a short chronology in Ezra-Nehemiah, a chronology that assumes that the Artaxerxes of Ezra 7ff. and Nehemiah is in fact Darius. This month we examine the argument against the short chronology. There is only one argument, and that is that the…
The Priestly Genealogy Jeshua the high priest, who returned with Zerubbabel, was not a young man at the time. We know this because his father, Jehozadak, was taken into captivity (1 Chron. 6:15). Thus was 50 years before the decree of Cyrus (2 Kings 25:18-22, by implication). Jehozadak’s father Seraiah,…
Thomas C. Oden, After Modernity . . . What? Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990. Reviewed by Rev. Jeffrey Meyers. Reading Oden’s After Modernity . . . What? was tonic. There were passages that launched me out of my chair with a hoot to pace the office floor — of course, the…
Matthew records that Jesus "withdrew" to Galilee to begin His public ministry there after He "heard that John had been delivered up" (Mt. 4:12). Matthew’s typically matter-of-fact style veils the truly remarkable character of Jesus’ withdrawal. Matthew has been presenting Jesus as the Messiah, the Seed of Abraham and Son…
John Brown called this one of the most difficult passages in the entire epistle to the Hebrews, and Hebrews is no easy book. Several questions confront us as we read and meditate on these verses. First, in what sense did the Old Testament saints described in verses 4-38 not receive…
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Love has power to transform the world and lovers. "Love is the answer to the despair in which a reality is lost that knows nothing other than law, fate, and will" (74). Rosenstock-Huessy makes this claim in his Sociology , but he's not being gauzily sentimental. Love takes public form…
What did the fathers who formulated the Nicene Creed mean to assert when they described the relationship between Father and Son with the term homoouios , "same substance"? In what sense "substance" and in what sense "same"? Surveying the usage of this terminology before Nicea, Christopher Stead ( Divine Substance…
Through the administration of the mystery, the manifold wisdom of God is made know through the church to rulers and authorities in the heavenly places (Ephesians 3:9-10). The “mystery” is something hidden in God for ages past and now revealed in Christ. In Ephesians, the mystery is the union of…
Public discourse, it is often argued, has to be conducted in common language, and religious language isn't common. Religion has to be left in the "vestibule." Where does that perception come from? asks Charles Taylor . Taylor traces it to an epistemological distinction: "There is secular reason, which everyone can…
Stephen Holmes ( Quest for the Trinity ) summarizes Gregory of Nyssa's response to Eunomius's use of divine names: "Gregory is scathing about Eunomius's assumption that the divine essence can be adequately named. His arguments on this point are often unsatisfactory, turning regularly on the assumption that the same divine…
Lenn Goodman's essay in Theology and the Soul of the Liberal State presents a devastating critique of Rawlsian political liberalism. The fundamental issue, Goodman claims, is that Rawls treats individual decisions as public acts, and therefore believes that liberalism needs to curtail the influence of ideologies even in the voting…
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