Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The preceding essay has caused me to consider the possibility that the life of Abraham as recounted in Genesis contains a typological prophecy of the history of Israel; that is, that the events in Abraham’s life broadly anticipate events in Israel’s history. This kind of pattern is seen in the…
by: Jeff Meyers and James Jordan In the fifth chapter of John’s gospel we read of a man who had been ill for 38 years and who was lying by a pool located by the Sheep Gate of Jerusalem. This sheep waited, as did many other infirm people, for an…
What had been reduced to ruin by this sex, would by the selfsame sex be recovered to salvation. As Eve believed the serpent, so Mary believed the angel. The delinquency which the one occasioned by believing, the other by believing effaced. —Tertullian What is Paul saying about women and salvation…
Back in Biblical Horizons 132 I discussed the horrible abuse of the converted men of Salem/Shechem in Genesis 34. These Hivites had joined the covenant by circumcision and then were slaughtered by Simeon and Levi. That, however, is not the end of their story. In Joshua 9 we find the…
Genesis 14:14 says that Abram mustered his trained men, “born in his house,” to rescue Lot, and gives their number as 318. It is clear that the precise number is provided for some reason, but what is it? S. Gevirtz notes that 318 is the sum of all the prime…
Simon Peter went up, and drew the net to land, full of large fish, a hundred and fifty-three; and although there were so many, the net was not torn. (John 21:11) This is one of those texts in the Bible that many people puzzle over. It is not a puzzle…
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From Australia, reader Mike Bull responds to my earlier post: I recently heard a pastor from southern India speak, and it sounds like ‘enchantment’ is still as powerful as it ever was (although, despite his hair-raising stories, it seems the best Satan can do to the saints in India at…
An eighteenth-century French missionary, Joseph-Francois Lafitau, wrote of the Iroquois: “The men who are so idle in their villages, regard their indolence as a sign of glory in order to make everyone understand that they are actually only born for the great things and particularly for war. For there they…
Thoughts from what Jim Jordan calls the “deep weird”:In Revelation, the angelic elders give up their crowns at the outset, and at the end of the book the saints are enthroned for a thousand years. Revelation depicts a transition from angelic to human government. Angels, Scripture tells us, are somehow…
Elias wryly comments that in urban societies the manufacture and use of clocks is similar to the use of masks in tribal cultures: “one knows they are made by people but they are experienced as if they represented an extra-human existence. Masks appear as embodiments of spirits. Clocks appear as…
Elias challenges the Cartesian method of doubt, arguing that Descartes scrums around to get beneath all he’s picked up and finds, at bottom, things he’s picked up: “he is supposed to penetrate in his meditation, all on his own, to a layer of his own intellect believed, in accordance with…
Norbert Elias ( An Essay on Time ) writes that “for a long time . . . there were, even within one and the same state, traditional local diversities with regard to the beginning of a year, and thus to its end. As far as one can see, it was…
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