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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Spinoza summarizes the common opinion of his day: “They suppose, forsooth, that God is inactive so long as nature works in her accustomed order, and vice versa , that the power of nature and natural causes are idle so long as God is acting: thus they imagine two powers distinct…
Spinoza writes in his Theologico-Political Treatise that “the sign of circumcision is, as I think, so important, that I could persuade myself that it would preserve the nation forever. Nay, I would go so far as to believe that if the foundations of their religion have not emasculated their minds…
Calvin described Scripture as an accommodation to human capacities - God babbles to us like a parent to a baby. Spinoza and Galileo appealed to the same principle. For Galileo, it was a way of retaining the truth of Scripture, at least as regards matters of faith, while also maintaining…
Frampton’s book makes it clear that the appeal of Cartesian method was its promise to cut through the fog of skepticism and debate and get to demonstrable certainty. Lodeqijk Meyer’s preface to Spinoza’s Principia philosophiae Cartesianae (1663) makes this explicit: “You will find that with the exception of mathematics hardly…
When the Arminian pastor at Warmond was dismissed from his post after Dordt, the congregation refused the Gomarist pastor sent to fill the vacancy. Instead, led by Gijsbert van der Kodde, the church organized itself into a “college,” a democratically organized Bible study group, devoted, as they thought, to the…
Grotius “proved” the truth of the Bible by saying that “in their stories as well as in the rules they give, nothing is taught that is unworthy of God, nothing that is not conducive to the best conduct of life, whereas poets, philosophers and all those who claim to instruct…
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