Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Jonah is Paul’s typological opposite. Indeed, in the whole Old Testament, it would be difficult to find a more perfect foil to Paul than Jonah. Whereas Paul crosses the sea to enact God’s saving purposes for the Gentiles, Jonah crosses the sea to avoid bringing Gentiles God’s mercy. For that…
Years ago, I realized that if my children wanted to feel like their house was a home, I needed to be intentional about making our physical shelter a place of spiritual refuge. I began to see the Holy Spirit as the indwelling person of the Trinity—the one who makes His…
When the crowds encircle Christ in Solomon’s Porch during the Festival of Dedication, they charge him: “tell us boldly who you are!” 1 They do not draw-up to him to with excited anticipation as they did earlier in the Gospel, 2 instead they flank him like a gang of wolves.…
1 In Deuteronomy 7:1-5, Moses wrote: When Yahweh your God brings you into the land which you go to possess, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations…
Every Advent witnesses the gruesome reanimation of the voice that whispers “you know , Christmas is just a pagan holiday…” with that sort of conversational ellipsis that does not so much invite further reflection but halts and forecloses it. The claims are several and equally spurious: Jesus wasn’t born on…
Abraham's life in Genesis is a series of trials. He travels hundreds of miles from his family into a new land, flees from a famine into the hands of a king who takes his wife, and after returning, has to rescue his brother from a war. He's involved with two…
Showing page 24 of 309
Showing page 8 of 43
A “mighty angel” descends from heaven holding an open book (Revelation 10:1). I agree with Richard Bauckham’s argument ( Climax of Prophecy: Studies on the Book of Revelation ) that this is the same as the book opened by the Lamb. When the book first appears, it is on the…
Peter Leithart and James Jordan are among America’s most penetrating Christian preachers and teachers, at once rigorously biblical and richly catholic. Their ambitious vision of the Lordship of Christ gives a vital role to the liturgical worship, helping us to see that the church is the New Israel, a nation…
Ancient temples were houses for the gods, represented by images. That is what Isaiah is talking about when he describes idolaters carrying their gold images, setting them in place, standing them up, and bowing to them (46:5-7). Yahweh too brings something to His House. Isaiah 46:13 pictures Yahweh as a…
In Isaiah 46:11, Yahweh announces that He is bringing a bird of prey from the east to do all his counsel and pleasure. It is a “man,” a reference back to Cyrus, the Shepherd who does all Yahweh’s pleasure (44:28). This is proof of the kind of God Yahweh is,…
Isaiah describes the Babylonian planet gods Bel (Jupiter) and Nebo (Nabu, Mercury) at the beginning of chapter 46. They are weary, bowed and stooped in defeat and fatigue. Their images are being carried on carts because they are incapable of bearing them themselves. The could not deliver ( malat )…
In her TNR review of Andrew Frisardi’s translation of Dante’s Vita Nova , Helen Vendler observes that Dante’s autobiographical cycle of prose and poems was not published until 1576, “almost three hundred years after its composition.” How was the Comedy understood in its absence? Beatrice appears in the Comedy of…
Showing page 858 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
