Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In a recent article in Biblical Horizons , I argued that the imagery of James 1:21 alludes to baptism, and particularly to baptism as an ordination and incorporation into the holy priesthood. This understanding of baptism as ordination to priesthood is not, I have since discovered, original, but in fact…
He will be a priest on his throne, and the counsel of peace will be between the two of them (Zechariah 6:13b). A prime difficulty in the interpretation of this verse is the antecedent of the pronoun "them." A number of alternatives have been offered. Some suggest that the "two"…
Like certain kinds of music, the unchanging rhythm of Aquinas's Summa gets into your bones. Read a few sections and it begins to run through your head. You start drumming your fingers, humming, swaying gently to the rhythm of Videtur-Sed Contra-Responsio, Videtur-Sed Contra-Responsio, “It seems-On the contrary-I answer.” The only…
The Book of Revelation is a gold mine of liturgical information. The various hymns and exclamations in Revelation have always been used in Christian worship. As I have been studying Revelation this year, it occurred to me that make a complete hymn out of the various hymns in the book.…
In the book of Revelation we find a triad of Strong Angels, and another triad of Other Angels. The purpose of this essay is to explore the Biblical background of these two sets, and thus fill out their meaning. The first triad of angels we encounter in the Bible comes…
In Revelation, the term aggelos means messenger, of course, but with a special emphasis on messenger as covenant administrator. This is immediately obvious from the fact that the angels are constantly acting to enforce the covenant one way or another: sealing people, bringing judgment, calling for repentance, etc. They are…
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On his way to visit a pleasing woman in Timnah, Samson is attacked by a lion (Judges 14). He defeats the lion, tearing it “like a young goat,” and then heads on to visit the lady. Does tearing a lion “like a young goat” mean tearing a lion “easily”? Is…
I summarize and interact with more of Naphtali Meshel’s The “Grammar” of Sacrifice at the Trinity House site , examining his concepts of “jugation” and “hierarchy” in “P.”
“It’s a very big, epic sci-fi movie,” says Larry Kasanoff of Threshold Entertainment. He’s talking about a movie based on Tetris, the game of falling geometric shapes. The movie is going to be much, much more than geometry. We’re going to learn that “‘Tetris’ is the teeny tip of an…
John Gray’s TNR review of Richard Dawkins’s An Appetite for Wonder is the very definition of withering. It should be read in full. As a public service, a few of the juicier quotations: “No two minds could be less alike than those of the great nineteenth-century scientist [i.e., Darwin] and…
The Paradosis Center of John Brown University put on an ecumenical conference on the gospel of John last week. I posted a brief report on the event on the Trinity House site .
The TLS reviewer says that Richard Flannagan aspires to poetry, and fails dismally, in his Man Booker nominated The Narrow Road to the Deep North . “The Narrow Road to the Deep North confuses poetry, the higher register, with the trope of repetition - and it is fatal. . .…
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