Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
It is clear now that Barack Obama is a fool. This was clear to anyone with Biblical wisdom during the campaign, but it is now becoming clear to everyone. The following analysis of this narcissist is invaluable: http://www.globalpolitician.com/25109-barack-obama-elections These rather radical comments are also worth considering: http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/print.asp?ID=9668 What is telling…
I was asked to provide comments on the rainbow in the Bible. Here are some for starters: 1. God puts his warbow in the sky for HIM to see and remember the covenant. 2. In Revelation 4-5, this warbow is around His throne, so He sees it all the time.…
We are about to enter a new era of world history. How will it come? The last time it came, it came by means of God conquering the impossible and overcoming barriers that were superhuman. That is how God does it every time He does a new thing. The last…
What happens if the church doesn’t sing the Imprecatory Psalms? We don’t like them. They are mean and nasty, and the one outstanding virtue inculcated in our public schools and universities (as Allan Bloom noted more than twenty years ago in his observations of American college students) is “niceness.” But…
The whole of the modern world is still an outworking of Augsburg and Westphalia. It is now a world incapable of marriage, intimacy, and relationship. The whole of the modern world is terribly, terribly wounded. It gives rise to children who have a variety of dysfunctions. Some of them are…
Perhaps the most fearful of all possibilities in the world is the possibility of betrayal on the part of someone who is in a “position of trust.” This, unfortunately, is the first block in what ought to be the foundation of every marriage in the world. Every woman has a…
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In a recent PhD dissertation from Florida State, Margaret Armstrong traces the connections between the Oxford movement and Jane Harrison’s Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion . Harrison “practiced a wild, emotional brand of High Churchism and that its traces linger in her letters and her autobiography and further…
I reflect on the political potency of symbolism at Canon and Culture, the web site of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.
Klawans ( Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple ) is disturbed by the gap between studies of biblical purity and studies of sacrifice. Mary Douglas proposed that Levitical purity was not primitive, but systematic, symbolic, and socially functional. Even those who are unconvinced by her proposals has to take Levitical purity…
Klawans helpfully reminds us of the pre-preparations for sacrifice ( Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple ). To offer an animal, an Israelite has to have one, and it has to be unblemished. Worshipers begin by being shepherds and herdsmen, and they have to be careful ones. Careful like Yahweh: “Israel’s…
In his first book, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism , Jonathan Klawans explores the complex relations of sin and impurity in biblical law and later Jewish thought. He distinguishes between “ritual defilement” that arises from unavoidable natural processes and “moral defilement” that arises from sin. In Purity, Sacrifice, and…
In his Taboo , Fritz Steiner observed that the discovery of Polynesian taboo customs was a “Protestant discovery” (50). Admitting that this was a historical accident, he still thought it worth remarking, and thought it contained a clue to 19th-century obsessions with taboo: “The problem of taboo became extraordinarily prominent…
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