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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Ephesians 2:13-14: But now in Christ Jesus you who formerly were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For He Himself is our peace, who made both groups into one, and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall. Why can’t we all just get along?…
Ephesians 4:4-6: There is one body and one Spirit, just as also you were called in one hope of your called; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all. After Paul describes how Jesus unites Jew…
In a volume on Philo’s etymology of Hebrew names, Lester Grabbe notes that allegory and etymology played an important role in Greek interpretation of myths: ” In the physical types of allegory the gods were related directly and baldly to the nature elements by etymology, so that Hera was air…
The inventive Calum Carmichael ( The Story of Creation ) argues that “John, in an imaginative, allusive approach to the text of Genesis that is akin to Philo’s approach before him does indeed lay out the equivalent of the seven days of creation. The elements of each day in Genesis…
Anthony Thiselton ( New Horizons in Hermeneutics ) notes that “It may readily be granted, without any difficulty that some (or even in principle many) biblical texts do function in ways which invite a reader-oriented hermeneutic.” A very wise statement, that. Wise, first, in acknowledging the strength of reader-oriented modes…
Eco is not uncritical of Derrida, but he disagrees with Searle’s claim that “Derrida has a distressing penchant for saying things that are obviously false,” insisting instead that “Derrida has a fascinating penchant for saying things that are nonobviously true, or true in a nonobvious way.” He elaborates: “When he…
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