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Writing

Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.

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Biblical Studies

Whom Shall We Believe? Evangelicals and Scholarship

As we move into the Persian period of ancient history, and try to reconcile it with Daniel’s prophecies, we need to ask some hard questions about the interpretation of the data before us. One question concerns the reliability of the Biblical witness, and beyond that a second question concerns the…

by James B. JordanJanuary 30, 1991
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Biblical Horizons

Understanding Russia

Ewa Majewska Thompson: Understanding Russia: The Holy Fool in Russian Culture Ewa M. Thompson is Professor and Chairman of the Department of German and Slavic Studies at Rice University. In this seminal study, she investigates the concept of the "holy fool" as it exists in Russian culture and civilization. While…

by James B. JordanJanuary 30, 1991
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Biblical Studies

The Bible and Western Literature

The most cursory glance at the history of Western literature reveals that it has been deeply influenced by the Bible. Some of the greatest classics of Western literature draw their plots, characters, and ideas largely from Scripture; Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost are two of the most notable…

by Peter LeithartJanuary 23, 1991
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Exodus

The Beautiful Child

Each time the Scriptures recount the story of Moses’ birth and deliverance from Pharaoh, reference is made to two facts about that event. First, each text points out that Moses was "beautiful." Second, each text points out that Amram and Jochebed, his parents, hid him for three months (cf. Ex.…

by Peter LeithartJanuary 23, 1991
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Romans

Who Rules the Land? The Meaning of the Noahic Covenant, Part 2

Click HERE for Part 1. The Message of the Covenant Can we really say that the saints presently rule the world, and always have since Noah? Look around and you can see that the wicked rule in virtually every country on earth. There are wicked civilizations that rise Babelically age…

by James B. JordanDecember 30, 1990
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Hermeneutics

Daniel’s 70 Weeks

As we saw last time , we have come to the place in the study of Biblical chronology where it seems that we are forced to abandon the Bible itself as our primary source of information. If we assume that the seventy sevens of Daniel 9:24-27 are in fact weeks…

by James B. JordanDecember 23, 1990

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Confessing Trinity

The point of Trinitarian theology is not simply that there are three instead of one. We can’t just plug our pre-conceptions about God into the Trinity, and say that now we are Trinitarian. We can’t assume Deism, the idea that God is a watchmaker who leaves the world to run…

December 15, 2015

The Common-Sensical Bishop Berkeley, 1

. He There is often a gap between the popular perception of a philosopher’s teaching and his own conception of his teaching. But the gap in Berkeley’s case is particularly wide. On the one hand, there is his own professed plan to justify common sense and combat skepticism. He reiterates…

December 15, 2015

Fathers and Sons in Ulysses

Joyce's Ulysses has a pendulum structure. JH Raleigh (in an essay in Joyce's Ulysses , 102) points out the contrast of filius and mater as these are the poles around which the action is organized: “solitary and single vs conjoined, both licitly and illicitly; homeless rover vs statonary huswife (husey);…

December 14, 2015

The God who Predestines

Paul begins the substance of the letter to the Ephesians by “blessing” God (1:3). As is well known, in Greek, verses 3-14 form a single long sentence, with one verb, “Blessed” (v. 3). This reflects a form of Jewish prayer, called the Berekah. It is not a request for God…

December 14, 2015

Rhetoric, Classical and Christian

In his The Invention of Christian Discourse , Vernon Robbins explains how and why Christian discourse and rhetoric diverged from classical models. Ryan Leif Hanson summarizes the argument in Silence and Praise : “Classical rhetoric understands the basic social reality of persons as based in the Graeco-Roman urban environment. In…

December 14, 2015

Retreat from Scripture

Marilynne Robinson is a theological anomaly. A self-confessed Calvinist, admirer of Calvin and Edwards, defender of original sin and predestination (which, she says right, is not determinism), she is also a self-described liberal Christian who tends to take predictably liberal positions on moral and political question and to use sneering…

December 11, 2015

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