Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I was still a high school student the first time I read Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, but I will never forget the powerful impact the book had on me. Of course, as a second year student, I did not fully digest the book. In spite of subsequent readings, I…
Crises force questions of identity. Identities may remain assumed until some event, or series of events, challenge what may have been taken for granted. The search for identity is an anxious one precisely because it tends to happen in times of upheaval and uncertainty. In his recent book, Orthoxox Anglican…
Peter Leithart recently wrote a fascinating short piece about the Half Shekel Temple Tax as an atonement. Leithart argues three main points. First that the Sanctuary Shekel was heavier, i.e., more valuable than the everyday shekel. Second, he offers some analysis about the order of magnitude of the purchasing power…
There is no denial from the careful reader that 1 Samuel 24 and 26 are telling the same story. Perhaps we should say, virtually the same story. But that the stories are cut from the same cloth is undeniable. What we have over these three chapters—1 Samuel 24-26—is a very…
In his novel That Hideous Strength , C.S. Lewis is able to masterfully illustrate in narrative form so many of his insights about the subversive dangers of Leftist political dogma to Christian civilization. Perceptive essays from Lewis like “The Abolition of Man” and “The Inner Ring” are fleshed out in…
At a very practical level, the Evangelical Church has been injected with counterfeit spiritualities. We are a people looking for a city, whose builder may only be in office for four years. Our temptation to veer to the side of the temporal is striking in our day, especially as the…
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Jesus is described twice in Revelation as the “root of David” (5:5; 22:16). “Son of David” or “Seed of David” makes sense; Jesus comes from the Davidic line. But Jesus is not only the fruit, but the root of the Davidic house. He is the original Anointed One before who…
In a 1984 JBL article, Elizabeth Struthers Malbon suggested that the boat in Mark’s gospel represents a “mediator” between sea and land, and pointed out that Jesus treats the sea as if it were land (walking on it, showing no concern for the unsteadiness of the waves, etc.). If we…
PROVERBS 21:20 The verse could be translated, more woodenly, as “Stores desired and oil in the habitation of the wise; but the foolish Adam swallows it.” The verse contrasts the conduct of the wise and of the foolish, and the basic contrast is between the wise man who has things…
Well, a bit of looking pays off. One Justin Champion has written a study of priestcraft in early Enlightenment England, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken (Cambridge 1992), which is available in its entirety online at: http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/catalogue/viewcat.php?id=OTHE00029. Chapter 5 begins with a paragraph that links the attacks on priestcraft with the…
Writing of Spinoza, Jonathan Israel ( Radical Enlightenment ) notes that Spinoza outlines “the concept of priestcraft as a system of organized imposture and deception, rooted in credulousness and superstitution, which loomed so large in the subsequent history of the Enlightenment and was to receive massive amplification in the books…
Not of the Hitchens-Dawkins-Harris variety, but of the seventeenth century variety. The four figures most often attacked for formulating a thoroughgoing atheistic perspective were Spinoza (for his biblical work as well as his metaphysics), Hobbes, La Peyrere (author of Pre-Adamites ), and Lodewijk Meyer (author of Philosophia Scripturae Interpres ).…
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