Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
There’s something about joy that is infectious. And occasionally, we all have the opportunity to be in someone’s presence who is so happily engaged in their work, so joyous in their pursuits, that we want to learn from them. We want to know where that joy comes from and attain…
Jesus has told us that He intends all nations to be discipled. Nations. Not just individuals. All nations as theocracies. That being the case, the Church exists for the life of the world. Being baptized is not only a matter of becoming part of a new family, it is also…
Harold Bloom’s essay on Macbeth includes the kind of penetrating insights that make Bloom the great Shakespearean scholar that he is, but it also includes his typical and intense anti-Christian bias. “If Lear was pre-Christian, then Macbeth is weirdly post-Christian. There are, as we have seen, Christian intimations that haunt…
Revelation 16 is a day of atonement text. The tabernacle of the testimony has been opened (15:5). The angels who receive the bowls are clothed in linen (15:6), the clothing of the high priest when he goes into the sanctuary on the day of atonement (Leviticus 16:4). The temple is…
From time to time, when I’ve lectured on how to read the Bible, I’ve used art-music as one example thereof. When we listen to a simple folk song, we hear the same melody over and over again, but this is not how composers write "high" music. Let me amplify. A…
"For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea-monster, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (Matthew 12:40). Some reflections on Jonah’s Big Fish have led to the following essay. Let me…
Showing page 142 of 309
Showing page 9 of 43
Hamann, describing the Christian giving his heart to God as a renunciation of ownership of his heart: “Here it is my God! You demanded it, as blind, hard, rocky, misguided, and stubborn as it was. Purify it, create it anew, and let it become the workshot of your good Spirit.…
Ken Way of Biola University gave a very interesting paper on the various Hebrew terms for donkeys and mules. He focused on Zechariah 9, which, he argued, has long been mistranslated. It has the largest cluster of donkey terms in the Hebrew Bible, refers to the prophecy concerning Judah in…
Al Wolters gave a very thorough and sophisticated explanation of the term peres in the writing on the wall in Daniel 5. I can’t reproduce it all, but one of the cool things that emerged from it was that the weights mentioned add up to 181, and the date of…
Christian Eberhart of Lutheran Theological Seminary gave a presentation on the nature of sacrifice. I’m not a stickler for method, but there were basic methodological problems with Eberhart’s approach. He started from a definition of sacrifice from Wolfhart Stegeman, which laid out four meanings of the word “sacrifice” in modern…
Lawrence Wellborn gave a fascinating paper on Alain Badiou’s treatment of Paul. I’m not sure I can summarize everything in his rich and wide-ranging paper, but I’ll try to get some of the main themes in the enumerated points below. 1) He began with a summary of what Badiou means…
INTRODUCTION When Jesus comes into the world, He claims that the “time is fulfilled,” and the rest of the New Testament fills this out. With the coming of Jesus, a new age begins. We live in a different time because of Jesus, and this different time should be embodied in…
Showing page 1445 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
