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Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.

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Ezra

Ezra: The Aaronic Rest-Giver

If you’re a preacher looking for good commentaries on Ezra, you’ll struggle. Certainly to find ones that wrestle in good detail with the text. And certainly ones that don’t cost you an arm and a leg. There’s a good bit more for Nehemiah, which is odd, as the two are…

by Rhys LavertyJune 8, 2021
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1 John

1 John in Community

Quick thought experiment: try to pretend you’ve never read 1 John before. Read 1:1-6. Go ahead; I’ll wait. Now, on to v. 7: “But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with ______….” What word would you expect in that blank, based…

by Tim NicholsJune 1, 2021
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Hermeneutics

Spending Time with Noah: Reflections on Prepositions in the Flood Narrative

In my work as a Bible translator, I was recently checking our translation team’s draft of Genesis 8:8, which says of Noah (translating the Hebrew quite literally): And he sent out the dove from with him to see: had the waters lessened from upon the face of the ground? Part…

by Josh JensenMay 25, 2021
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Philosophy

Steven Weinberg Destroyed My Faith

Just in case a reader may not know Weinberg, he is a theoretical physicist and the winner of the Nobel prize in physics in 1979, as well as countless other prizes for his research. He is also a prolific, lucid, and captivating writer. If you want to read something on…

by Ralph Allan SmithMay 18, 2021
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Colossians

Reconciliation in Colossians 1:20

Colossians 1:15-20 is a famous passage in Paul’s epistles because it is a succinct and powerful poem. It appears even to have been a hymn. Given the uniquely Pauline language — “reconciliation” is a term used only by Paul — it should not seem odd to attribute the poem/hymn to…

by Ralph Allan SmithMay 11, 2021
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Movies

Terror of Knowing Myself

Stalker (1979) is a film by Andrei Tarkovsky based on Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers. It shows a day from the life of a stalker, a man who enters the so-called "Zone", an Alien landing site, where he leads people to a room that grants people’s innermost desires, which…

by Bogumil JarmulakMay 4, 2021

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Paul the Hellenizer?

Schweitzer didn’t think so, but he did think that Paul prepared the ground for Hellenization. According to the summary found in Stephen Neill and N. T. Wright’s history of New Testament interpretation, Schweitzer identified the primary historical problem of Paul studies, namely to explain the transition from Jesus to Paul…

January 20, 2009

Covenant

Irenaeus interpreted Jesus’ parable of the laborers in the vineyard as a parable about Jews and Gentiles (Matthew 20:1-16). The first-hour men are Jews, and the eleventh-hour men, who slip into the vineyard at the last minute, are Gentiles converted by the apostles. Over the surly objections of the Jews,…

January 19, 2009

Joshua’s Jubilee

Luke 3-4 follows, like Matthew 3-4, the history of Israel. Jesus is the true Israel, recapitulating Israel’s failed story. But the sequence is somewhat different in the two passages. In Matthew, Jesus receives baptism from John, enters the wilderness to be tempted, begins His ministry in Galilee, before ascending to…

January 19, 2009

Sermon notes

INTRODUCTION Jesus continues on the way toward Jerusalem , predicting His own future and teaching the Twelve about discipleship. They don’t understand, but fortunately Jesus is the compassionate Son of David, who opens blind eyes ( 20:29 -34). THE TEXT “Now Jesus, going up to Jerusalem, took the twelve disciples…

January 19, 2009

David covenant

Psalm 89 explicitly tells us that Yahweh entered into a covenant with David (v. 28), which makes David the firstborn over the kings of the earth (v. 27) and promises a perpetual seed and sonship (vv. 26, 29). The Psalm as a whole, however, is about an apparently broken covenant.…

January 18, 2009
Philosophy

Aquinas at Oxford

In the first volume of his history of ethics, Terence Irwin gievs a chapter to Plato, four to Aristotle, but nine to Aquinas. Reviewing the book in the TLS , Anthony Kenny says that Aquinas “emerges as the hero of the entire volume,” and, after noting that Irwin holds a…

January 17, 2009

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