Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Job appears in the Bible as a true story and it is regarded as such in other Scripture: As an example of suffering and patience, brothers, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. Behold, we consider those blessed who remained steadfast. You have heard of the…
Thanksgiving is warfare. Gratitude is a weapon. Wield it well. Give thanks for the preparation. The hustle and bustle, the messy kitchen, the endless cleaning, the extra chairs, and stained tablecloths sing the song of hospitality. God desires that we prepare a place for friends and strangers, feasting and laughing,…
We often hear that, along with Leviticus, Ecclesiastes is the “most peculiar book,” lurking in the Bible’s back alley. 1 But it is high time that we retire this old dirge. God has concealed much gold here, therefore much glory is ours if we are careful to read Solomon’s wisdom…
1 Do you know when the mountain goats give birth? Do you observe the calving of the does? 2 Can you number the months that they fulfill, and do you know the time when they give birth? Job 39 We have and we do, Lord God. Spring is calving season.…
For six days work may be done, but on the seventh day you shall have a holy day, a Sabbath of complete rest to Yahweh. - Exodus 35:2 The instructions for building the tabernacle end with a Sabbath command and the narrative about building begins with a Sabbath command, before…
High in the list of now forgotten sins is simony. It was not always so: the medieval schoolmen believed simony to be the worst of ecclesiastical crimes and waged a centuries long campaign to purge the Church of this financial and spiritual corruption. As the schoolmen robustly defined it, “simony…
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In his fascinating Rise of Christianity , Rodney Stark cites estimates that there were between 10,000 and 20,000 inhabitants of Jerusalem in the first century. Stark uses this to falsify Luke’s claims that there were 5000 Christians in Jerusalem (Acts 4:4) and “many thousands” of Jews (Acts 21:20): “Had there…
One Rhonda Wauhkonen discusses Nicholas of Lyra’s “Hebraic” semiotics and hermeneutics in a 1992 article on Chaucer. She begins by contrasting Augustine’s signum/res distinction to Lyra’s Hebraic viewpoint: “In the Hebrew system as evidenced in Scripture and as adapted by Nicholas, such stratification of signification did not exist, for the…
Nicholas of Lyra is known for his notion of a “double literal” sense to Scripture. For him, interpretation ad litteram includes both the historical and the doctrinal/christological senses, and he suggests that the ancient Hebrews could well have seen the Messianic sense as the literal sense. He also suggests that…
In Book 3 of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Rabelais attributes an odd opinion to the 14th-century exegete, Nicholas of Lyra: “Pantagruel, having wholly subdued the land of Dipsody, transported thereunto a colony of Utopians, to the number of 9,876,543,210 men, besides the women and little children, artificers of all trades, and…
In Book 3 of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Rabelais attributes an odd opinion to the 14th-century exegete, Nicholas of Lyra: “Pantagruel, having wholly subdued the land of Dipsody, transported thereunto a colony of Utopians, to the number of 9,876,543,210 men, besides the women and little children, artificers of all trades, and…
Steinmetz summarizes Thomas’s remarkably “NTWrightian” commentary on Matthew 20:1-16. While acknowledging an Origenist tradition that sees the hours as moments of an individual life, Thomas is more interested in the Irenaean tradition that interprets the parable in terms of redemptive history: “The hours mentioned in the parable are not stages…
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