Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Job appears in the Bible as a true story and it is regarded as such in other Scripture: As an example of suffering and patience, brothers, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. Behold, we consider those blessed who remained steadfast. You have heard of the…
Thanksgiving is warfare. Gratitude is a weapon. Wield it well. Give thanks for the preparation. The hustle and bustle, the messy kitchen, the endless cleaning, the extra chairs, and stained tablecloths sing the song of hospitality. God desires that we prepare a place for friends and strangers, feasting and laughing,…
We often hear that, along with Leviticus, Ecclesiastes is the “most peculiar book,” lurking in the Bible’s back alley. 1 But it is high time that we retire this old dirge. God has concealed much gold here, therefore much glory is ours if we are careful to read Solomon’s wisdom…
1 Do you know when the mountain goats give birth? Do you observe the calving of the does? 2 Can you number the months that they fulfill, and do you know the time when they give birth? Job 39 We have and we do, Lord God. Spring is calving season.…
For six days work may be done, but on the seventh day you shall have a holy day, a Sabbath of complete rest to Yahweh. - Exodus 35:2 The instructions for building the tabernacle end with a Sabbath command and the narrative about building begins with a Sabbath command, before…
High in the list of now forgotten sins is simony. It was not always so: the medieval schoolmen believed simony to be the worst of ecclesiastical crimes and waged a centuries long campaign to purge the Church of this financial and spiritual corruption. As the schoolmen robustly defined it, “simony…
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In a 1980 article in the Journal of the History of Ideas Margret de Grazia helpfully described what she calls the “secularization of language” that occurred during the 17th century. Her contribution is to show that the often-noted “linguistic pessimism” of the century arose from the destruction of “the traditional…
Lori Branch links the Reformation and post-Reformation attack on ritual with the formation of the Cartesian self: “the Reformation religious subject gradually became less a participant in communal, bodily ritual action, and more and more the Cartesian cogito , an individual, inward-looking possessor of knowledge drawn from evidence and analysis.…
1 John 4:8 says that the one who does not love does not know God because God is love. This might be legitimately read as: God is love; knowing God therefore necessarily involves knowing love; therefore, the one who does not know love does not know God. But that’s not…
The Son is sent to be savior of the world (1 John 4:14). And it’s only as the only-begotten Son that He can be Savior. This is true in the usual sense that Jesus is the “contact point” between God and man. But it’s also true in a more subtle…
John uses the phrase “only begotten” ( monogenes ) four times in his gospel (1:14, 18; 3:15, 18). (I’m assuming here the controversial point that the phrase does mean “only begotten.”) He uses it only once in his first epistle: God’s love is manifest in the fact that “God has…
Commentators sometimes suggest that 1 John 4:1-6 marks a rupture in John’s argument. 3:23 speaks of love as a commandment of God, but there is no mention of love in 4:1-6, which discusses testing the spirits and the warfare between the Spirit of God and the spirits of the world.…
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