Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
That there is something wrong with the world is obvious. It does not take much time or brilliance to notice it. Once we get the feeling that we could imagine a better world, we are tempted to fix it or, if we cannot, to escape it. For both the world-fixers…
“Our Father in heaven,” what is man that we should be called your sons and daughters, beloved children of God Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, Yahweh of Hosts, the Ancient of Days. You are not a father preoccupied with work or engrossed in your smartphone; you are a present…
The Son of God took on human flesh and entered into the sin and suffering of our world. His life and teaching and suffering from His conception to His suffering on the cross teaches us a lot about how the good news enters into the world. Recently, I was teaching…
There is an unspoken rule about typology that permeates Evangelical thinking. It goes something like this: “If the New Testament authors don’t use an Old Testament character as a type, we don’t either.” There is a soundness in this reasoning, at least in a preliminary sense. There is no better…
In The world of Silence, Max Picard writes, “There does not seem to be any space left where there could possibly have been anything but noise. We take it for granted much as we take the air itself for granted. Everything begins and ends with noise.” Is it fair to…
God is Not There God is not in the book of Esther. Do a word search and you will get 0 results. Also try Lord, Yahweh, Prayer, Temple, or Sacrifice. Even names with God’s name in them, like Elijah, Jeremiah, or Daniel are missing. The fool says in his heart,…
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1 Samuel 16:2-3: But Samuel said, How can I go? When Saul hears of it, he will kill me. And the Lord said, Take a heifer with you, and say, I have come to sacrifice to the Lord. And you shall invite Jesse to the sacrifice, and I will show…
Samuel anointed David with oil to designate him as the crown-prince, the successor of Saul. But why oil? Oil is food. It is one of the main ingredients of bread in Scripture, and a food in its own right. With grapes and grain, oil is one of the main products…
Walter Burkert has spent a good bit of his life tracing Greek art, mythology, language, and social practices to ANE origins. In his 2004 Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis he analyzes the passage from the Iliad where Hera deceptively tells Zeus she is going to Oceanus, whom she calls “origin of the…
Was Augustine, as Charles Taylor and others have said, the inventor of Western interiority? Perhaps, but only because Augustine was misread. Matthew Maguire offers this summary of the the effects of Arnauld d’Andilly’s 1649 French translation of Augustine’s Confessions: “Although d’Andilly faithfully renders memory’s opening unto the infinite - and…
It’s an old story now, but I just came across it. In a 2002 editorial on the paedophilia/homosexuality crisis in the Catholic church, Charles Krauthammer recounted a story about a priest in Hobart, Australia. Many years ago, a rapist entered the church hoping for protection from the authorities. When the…
Allison again, commending on Hebrews 9:15-22 and the phrase “this is the blood of the covenant” that the writer of Hebrews quotes from Moses: “There is no ‘this is’ . . . in Exod. 24:8. The MT prefaces ‘the blood’ with HINNEH, the LXX with IDOU. Why the modification? The…
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