Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
After Elijah’s battered and depressed howling in the wilderness it must have seemed like the new prophet came eating and drinking. Which is a pattern we see again in the New Testament—John is explicitly identified with Elijah (Luke 1.17, Matthew 11.14), howling the truth in the wilderness that the people…
Reading Robert Conquest’s biography of Stalin 1 has opened new lines of meditation on Paul’s command in Colossians 3:9. But before turning to that, let me briefly indicate what Paul is not saying. He is not saying that there is no such thing as righteous deception, such as Jael practiced…
You won’t find wild lions today in Israel. But lions used to range much more widely than they do now, and in biblical times they were a menace that shepherds in Israel had to contend with. David did as a shepherd boy, and Amos—who “ was among the sheepbreeders of…
I would like to remedy a flaw for English speakers in the book of Genesis. A flaw that may seem innocuous, but we must remember where the devil lives...in the details. If we are to fear the Lord, it behooves our translation committees to ensure that the fearfulness of God…
While reading at my son’s baseball game this week, a mom from our school approached me and asked if I was reading Dante. I wasn’t, but our sons are both reading Divine Comedy in their sophomore literature class, so it was a reasonable question. What unfolded was a quick conversation…
In the first two essays in this series, I addressed the question of how the nations would learn about Israel’s Torah, in the second essay especially emphasizing the aesthetic aspects of Israel’s testimony. For we naturally wonder: How would people in Mesopotamia or Egypt, not to mention the rest of…
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Inevitably, after an event like the Biola panel on the future of Protestantism, one wakes up thinking of the things one should have said. Here are a few. 1) One thing I did say that I need to reiterate: It seems that the three participants meant different things when we…
William Logan’s Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure is incisive, full of juicy assaults like these: “Mary Oliver is the poet laureate of the self-help biz and the human-potential movement. She has stripped down the poetry in Red Bird until it is nothing but a naked set of values: that the human…
Daniel Albright observes in his Panaesthetics that Renaissance perspective “is more unnatural, even seditious to nature, than it first appears” (49). The reason is that “Perspective is less concerned with objects than with space - it lavishes its resources on relations, not on things. In some Renaissance paintings, the thing…
Brad Gregory ( Unintended Reformation ) emphasizes the role of Christian division in the formation of modern institutions and ideologies. But he also shows at several points that the modern efforts to head off the unintended consequences of the Reformation failed or even made the disease worse. Natural law was…
According to John Thiel’s analysis in Senses of Tradition (154), innovation in the church often seems initially to be a threat to tradition: “The ecclesial investment in constancy often leads to the eclipse of the ‘still’ of the present and the ‘will be’ of the future by the ‘always’ of…
In an earlier post , I noted that Revelation 4 describes not only a heavenly temple but a heavenly court. But the judgment isn’t passed until chapter 20, when the saints have taken thrones to share in the proceedings. The beasts have already been throne into the lake of fire…
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