Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Bruce Marshall once wrote that every young man who rings the bell at a brothel is unconsciously looking for God. While it is not necessarily true that the inward desire of every man is ultimately a thirst for righteousness, it is true that every sin is the disordering of a…
In a previous essay , I argued that the story which begins with Lot and culminates in Ruth’s great-grandson David follows God’s five-fold pattern of creative work as laid out by Jim Jordan: taking something in hand (in this case, the Abrahamic family), restructuring it, distributing the product of labor,…
Gilder, George. Men and Marriage. Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2023. 1 By 1973, the hightide of second-wave feminism had flooded the beaches of American culture. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique eroded the shores of traditional female roles by naming and stirring up further domestic discontentment. Kate Millet wrote her dissertation-turned-book,…
The Book of Job is a very tortuous book. The arguments of Job and his friends are shot through with truth and error hopelessly mixed together. Every line of contentious poetry stands locked in deadly battle with every other line. As maddening as this can be for a reader who…
More than once in the last 50 years it has occurred to me that Paul might have known Jesus before He appeared to Paul on the Damascus road, but I had never taken up the notion in earnest until recently when I ran into a book by Stanley Porter titled…
The question in the title is genuine, not polemic. I could be perfectly happy to follow an ancient — and what is regarded as a well-attested — tradition. But I do not feel compelled to follow it simply because it is tradition. I would like to have arguments that Peter…
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Intertextuality is a buzz word in contemporary biblical scholarship. In New Testament studies, the impetus has come not only from literary critical approaches but from the “New Perspective on Paul,” whose main advocate, EP Sanders, encouraged the study of Pauline echoes and allusions to the Hebrew Scriptures and contemporary Jewish…
Shlomo Sand argues in How I Stopped Being A Jew that “he foundations on which the State of Israel was created were essentially laid by socialists from the various Eastern European nations. These individuals were secularists who rebelled against Judaism, yet they were forced none the less to adopt from…
In a 2001 article in History of Religious , Guy Stroumsa hightlights the role of John Spencer’s De legibus hebraeorum ritualibus (1685), sometime master of Corpus Christi, Cambridge, in the development of evolutionary and scientific studies of religion. Spencer, in turn, drew heavily on Jewish sources. Stroumsa writes, “Spencer was…
Yahweh promises Abram a son, but he grows old. He knows that his son will come from his own flesh (Genesis 15) but he doesn’t yet know that Sarai will be the mother (cf. Genesis 17). Sarai comes up with a plan: Hagar can serve as surrogate. Sarai’s goal is…
The final chapters of Isaiah are a letdown. From chapter 40 on, Isaiah has given a brilliant portrait of the coming redemption, a return from exile. Yahweh will return to His people. His Servant will bring justice to the nations. Gentile kings - Cyrus especially - will build Yahweh’s house.…
In his Criticism of Heaven , Roland Boer lays out a taxonomy of how Marxism has related to the Bible. There are three categories: biblical Marxism, Catholic Marxism, and the “Protestant turn.” In the first category are Marxists like Ernst Block and Walter Benjamin who interact with Christianity primarily by…
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