Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I mentioned last month ( BH 82) in my essay "Like a Dove" that Genesis 8 is a recapitulation of Genesis 1. Let me explicate that assertion here. Of course, the world after the Flood is a new creation, so we may expect a recapitulation of the first creation. It…
The book of Esther is one of the most neglected of the books of the Bible. To be sure, sermons are preached on it, and commentaries have occasionally been written on it, but almost without exception Esther has been interpreted in isolation from the rest of Biblical history, chronology, and…
Dear Mr. ______, . . . Here is how I look at the geocentricity question. Since I don’t recall what I wrote you before, I may be repeating some things. 1. The Bible does not teach it. Biblical passages used to support the idea are being misinterpreted. My original paper…
Answer 4 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism is often taken as a magnificent answer to the question, "What is God?" It reads: "God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth." Presbyterians are fond of praising this statement, preaching on it,…
The gospels tell us that at Jesus’ baptism, the Holy Spirit descended upon Him "in bodily form like a dove" (Luke 3:22 & parallels). Biblically sensitive commentators have associated this event with three Old Testament parallels: (1) the hovering of the Spirit over the creation in Genesis 1:2; (2) the…
This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. (John 8:6) The story of the woman taken in adultery (John 7:53-8:11) has been part of the canonical Christian Bible from its earliest…
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When Peter comes to the door of the house where the disciples are praying for him, they think it’s Peter’s “angel” (Acts 12:15). The thing at the door is recognizably Peter, but they don’t think it’s Peter in the flesh. It’s still the person, but not the embodied person, so…
The name John in Revelation 1:1 links the seer up with John the Baptist, the messenger who came from God to announce the coming of Christ. Some (JM Ford, Revelation (The Anchor Bible, Vol. 38) ) have suggested that this points to John the Baptist and his circle as the…
Cyril O’Regan ( Theology and the Spaces of Apocalyptic , 60)summarizes Bulgakov’s cautions about turning justice into the master theme of Christian witness. Bulgakov is “sensitive to the horrors that have been committed in the name of justice throughout history and proximally in the Russian Revolution. The thirst for justice…
Liberal Protestants and orthodox Protestant both tell the story of modern Protestantism as the opposition of liberalism and orthodoxy. Already in the 19th century, FC Baur doubted this scheme, and suggested there was a third form of Protestantism - a gnostic Protestantism. Cyril O’Regan’s Gnostic Return in Modernity is the…
Jenson makes the remarkable claim that God is Himself culture (in a contribution to God, Truth, and Witness: Engaging Stanley Hauerwas , 160-1): “What it is to be God is given in the Father’s eternal begetting of the Son and enlivening through the Spirit, in the Spirit’s eternal liberating of…
Joshua Davis gives a deft summary of J. Louis Martyn’s understanding of Pauline theology in the introduction to Apocalyptic and the Future of Theology: With and Beyond J. Louis Martyn , which Davis co-edited with Douglas Harinck. Building on but going beyond Kasemann, Martyn attempts to reconstruct Paul’s doctrine of…
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