Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In this essay we will think about how the whole Bible is structured as one Word of God. To begin with, there is only one Bible, not two. While we divide the Bible into Old and New Testaments, that division has no more meaning than divisions into chapters and verse,…
How should one badly bruised and inadequate church relate to another? (I am not addressing the blessed possessors of absolutely perfect churches, naturally.) I believe there are three things to bear in mind. First, we must be open to the values in other Christian traditions - even Roman Catholic and…
The third and sixth day have a second creative act. Note the chiastic arrangement of the material in these special acts and the parallelism between them, see the figure below. The author arranges the description of each day as a chiasm. Each line in the chiasm is mated with a…
Now the two of them were naked, the man and his woman, and they did not sense shame (Genesis 2:25) The nakedness of Adam and Eve requires several comments. First of all, against those who think that nakedness is what God intended for humanity as a permanent estate, we have…
I’ve been reflecting on the meaning of integration, and our longing for integration in a fragmented world. I’ve been connecting my own covenant epistemology further with the thought of scientist-philosopher Michael Polanyi, artist Makoto Fujimura, and Classical Christian metaphysician D.C. Schindler. In my last post , and now in this…
Luke 13:31-33 is one of the strangest passages in the Gospel of Luke. It begins with a time note that sounds emphatic “At that very hour.” Then, we are told of Pharisees bringing a message that Herod wants to kill Jesus! In His answer, Jesus speaks of a three day…
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The American university purports to be an institution dedicated to dispassionate inquiry and the pursuit of wisdom. Since the 1960s, many Americans have identified universities with anti-American radicalism, sexual libertinism, and moral relativism. That is certainly part of the crisis of American higher education. Less publicly, though, scientific and technical…
From the early centuries through the Reformation and beyond, Christian thinkers distinguished between violence and just acts of force. Justin argued that every “honourable person” would agree that “rulers should give their decision as having followed not violence and tyranny but piety and philosophy” ( First Apology , 2). Tertullian…
In Milbank’s view, Augustine violates his own privative doctrine of evil, which gives no “ontological purchase to dominium , or power for its own sake,” when he allows that punishment might take a purely positive form. For Milbank, “in any coercion, however mild and benignly motivated, there is still present…
While eschewing Marcionism, Eric Siebert attempts to distinguish between the textual and the actual God and argues that “ some Old Testament portrayals of God do not accurately reflect God’s character” ( Disturbing Divine Behavior: Troubling Old Testament Images of God ). But his overt selectivity leads him to split…
In a 2004 article in Word & World , Terence Fretheim claims that several texts of the Old Testament attribute violence (Heb. hamas ) to God. Only one is a convincing example. In Job 19:7, Job cries out against the “violence” done to him. He has just complied that Yahweh…
Christina Rosetti wrote a number of books dealing with biblical and spiritual themes. In one, Letter and Spirit , she suggests that it is “a genuine though not a glaring breach of the Second commandment, when instead of learning the lesson plainly set down for us in Holy Writ, we…
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