Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In an earlier paper 1 I argued that the story of Jonah belongs in the book of KINGS. Jonah and the unnamed Judean prophet in 1K13 are paired by the author through literary links. The Judean prophet travels longitudinally to confront national paganism and is killed but not swallowed by…
The Scriptures have much to say about “the day.” “This is the day that the Lord has made,” sings the Psalmist (Psalm 118:24). But what exactly is the day ? Or, more broadly, what even is a day? Days make up human life like water, light, and air. There’s no…
According to the Westminster Confession of Faith 21:5, “God is to be worshipped everywhere, in spirit and truth, …” A similar phrase is found in the OPC’s Directory for Public Worship (II.6). In my experience in the OPC and other Reformed churches, the phrase is often interpreted to mean that…
Introduction In Genesis 3:16, after the fall, God said that Eve would “desire” her husband and that her husband would “rule” over her. It is popular for Christians to interpret Eve's desire as sinful, that she would try to usurp her husband's authority. Likewise, some interpret Adam's rule as sinful,…
White Western/Christian society has long discriminated against lesbians and homosexuals — ever since the days of Moses — who was neither white nor Christian, but that is beside the point — who claimed that God gave him revelation about what a man or woman is and how they should relate…
They Found a Book in a Wall, You Won’t Believe What Happens Next The secret behind the history of quiet times will make your quiet times more effective than ever. One of the enduring mysteries of American Evangelicalism is the question of the source of Quiet Times: A Handbook ,…
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David Martin, responding to Shortt’s question about the link between his sociological work and his political theology: “The crux is the necessity of authority, which is a ‘functional pre-requisite’ of social organization, let alone civility, and includes a settled claim to power and the legitimate use of violence. Whatever the…
God’s Advocates , Rupert Shortt’s 2005 collection of interviews with prominent Christian thinkers, is one of the best introductions to contemporary theology available. Premised on the claims that theology is recovering its nerve and that this recovery is especially noticeable in the UK and America, the book includes interviews with…
Christians typically object to deterministic social theories. Humans are not, we insist, slaves to birth, culture, nurture, social status, political affiliation. We are free. That may be the wrong answer. The right answer may be: Yes, outside of Christ, human beings are slaves to all those things and more. These…
Rowan Williams says in an interview with Rupert Shortt, “what caught me and still catches me about Barth is that sense of exuberant bloody-mindedness, enlarged upon at huge length, the gusto, the verve of the theology, with all its outrageous misunderstandings of other people and its wonderfully sanctified egotism.”
FO Matthiessen notes the influence of the metaphysical style “of being ‘totus in illo’” both in individual lines (blubber burning “smells like the left wing of the day of judgment”; Ishmael working on nets imagines it all as “the Loom of Time” and himself as “a shuttle mechanically weaving and…
Melville, simplistically, claimed that the myth of Narcissus was the key to Moby Dick: “still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves…
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