Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Christmas is a joyful season, but for many it turns into something else. Instead of joy, it is full of disappointment and unhappiness. Instead of an occasion for family fellowship, it becomes an opportunity for opening old wounds, reigniting old arguments, giving new life to rancor that should have died…
The Temple of Time The “covenant-literary matrix” of the Bible is not a pattern imposed upon the text, but the internal logic of its arrangement. This fundamental structure, functioning at multiple levels simultaneously, is a ceaseless reiteration of God’s primary theme. It is an algorithm forged in the furnace of…
In the four hundred and eightieth year after the Exodus, Solomon began to build the temple of the Lord in Jerusalem. [1] That the author of Kings should date the start of the building of the temple from the Exodus is noteworthy. In Exodus 15:17, in Moses’ song following the…
Philip Schaff, a German Reformed theologian, states in The Principle of Protestantism that the material principle of Protestantism is “the doctrine of the justification of the sinner before God by the merit of Christ alone through faith.” This is the core message of the Church which leads “to the abandonment…
“Religion” is an attempt to create or build a tower with a top, or to build a temple that is self-contained. The story of The Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 is the story of mankind’s attempt to create a world that is self-contained and does not need God. All…
In the first essay in this series, I presented a case for dating Matthew before AD 70, contrary to the present scholarly consensus. In this essay, I intend to present cultural, personal, ecclesiological, and theological arguments for a very early date for Matthew. [1] The cultural argument concerns literacy in…
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Rosenstock-Huessy’s essay “Man Must Teach” begins as an analysis of Augustine’s dialogue with his son Adeodatus, the De Magistro , and then broadens out to a treatment of teaching as a paradigmatic social relation, as well as a treatment of the social construction of time. One of the key moves…
“There is a subtle intrigue going on between the generations,” writes Otto Kroesen in Planetary Responsibilities (120). “It is an intrigue of separating from, and inheriting, and convincing, and letting go of each other.” The recurring question is “whether only one generation can be the owner of the truth and…
The verb deiknuo , “show,” is used eight times in Revelation. Four of the uses are at the seams of the book, at the beginning of each new in-Spirit vision: 1. Jesus has been given to show John what must shortly take place (1:1). 2. When John sees a door…
As long as the apostles were alive, writes Robert Jenson, churches could check their understanding of the gospel by asking the living apostles: “Is this the gospel?” Once they died, the church needed something to mediate the apostolic witness: “her self-identity as the church of the apostles would not be…
Revelation begins (1:1, 19) with the announcement that God showed His bondservants what will soon “happen” or “become” ( ginomai ). It ends on the same note (22:6). What is it that happens? Judging from the scattered twenty-six uses of the verb ginomai , the happening that God unveils is…
When the seventh bowl is poured out on the air, the world collapses. The throne of God comes to earth, flashing and thundering and shaking the earth until everything that cannot stand collapses. Cities fall, islands run away, mountains disappear. And hailstones weighing a talent ( talantiaia ) fall to…
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