Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I was still a high school student the first time I read Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, but I will never forget the powerful impact the book had on me. Of course, as a second year student, I did not fully digest the book. In spite of subsequent readings, I…
Crises force questions of identity. Identities may remain assumed until some event, or series of events, challenge what may have been taken for granted. The search for identity is an anxious one precisely because it tends to happen in times of upheaval and uncertainty. In his recent book, Orthoxox Anglican…
Peter Leithart recently wrote a fascinating short piece about the Half Shekel Temple Tax as an atonement. Leithart argues three main points. First that the Sanctuary Shekel was heavier, i.e., more valuable than the everyday shekel. Second, he offers some analysis about the order of magnitude of the purchasing power…
There is no denial from the careful reader that 1 Samuel 24 and 26 are telling the same story. Perhaps we should say, virtually the same story. But that the stories are cut from the same cloth is undeniable. What we have over these three chapters—1 Samuel 24-26—is a very…
In his novel That Hideous Strength , C.S. Lewis is able to masterfully illustrate in narrative form so many of his insights about the subversive dangers of Leftist political dogma to Christian civilization. Perceptive essays from Lewis like “The Abolition of Man” and “The Inner Ring” are fleshed out in…
At a very practical level, the Evangelical Church has been injected with counterfeit spiritualities. We are a people looking for a city, whose builder may only be in office for four years. Our temptation to veer to the side of the temporal is striking in our day, especially as the…
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Allison notes the frequent ancient association of Moses with asses. According to Diodorus Siculus, “When Antiochus . . . made war against the Jews he entered the sacred shrine of the god, where only the priest is allowed to go. In it he found a stone image of a thick…
Waters also says, “Leithart also forthrightly rejects the Reformed doctrine of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to the believer.” I don’t do that either. What I have questioned, however, is whether we have exegetical grounds for distinguishing “imputation” as an act of reckoning from “justification” as a distinct declarative act.…
In his new book on the Federal Vision, Guy Waters claims, “It appears, then, that Leithart has called into question the historic Reformed doctrine of the imputation of Adam’s sin to his posterity.” I don’t. But Waters is right to sense that I’m interested in ways of formulating the doctrine…
Allison offers a series of interesting connections between the early chapters of Gen and the early chapters of Ex: 1) Israel is “multiplying” (Ex 2:2) in the way that God commanded the human race to multiply (Gen 1:26-28), concluding, with some help from Samaritan texts, that MOses is another Adam.…
In his book on Mosaic typology in Matthew, commenting on Matt 5:1-2 in particular, Allison reviews some of the Jewish literature that suggests that Moses sat enthroned on Sinai. The idea was based on Deut 9:9, where Moses says “I remained (YASHAB) on the mountain forty days and forty nights,”…
Interpretation is, we’re often told, a matter of explaining what’s in the text. Only eisegetes talk about what’s not already there. Discussing Matthew 1:1, Dale Allison offers this, much more accurate, alternative: “The interpretation of this line can be nothing other than the unfolding of what it not stated.” More…
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