Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I grew up in the 1950s. This was before the "Sixties" and the democratization, informalization, and general cheapening of the church and her worship. Ministers were Father Donovan, Pastor Eckhart, Reverend MacPherson, Mister (Episcopal) Parker, and Brother Smith. Liturgical speech was high language, sounding kind of like the King James…
Metaphor exerts a surprisingly powerful influence within our thinking. Although it is easily dismissed as little more than a figure of speech, when we attend more closely to the ways in which we use it, metaphor’s importance swiftly becomes more apparent. Although many of our metaphors have become quite invisible…
What is a tree, scientifically speaking? A mere googling gives the following answer: “a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground.” We can increase detail by describing its family, genus, species and…
The majority of Western evangelical Christians rarely, if ever, fast as a form of spiritual discipline. In our culture, fasting is more connected with dieting than worship, the other side of our deeply ambiguous fascination with food. Food is everywhere. We eat more than ever before, at greater speed, and…
A Grammar of Creation An understanding of the visual-musical language of the Bible must begin with Genesis 1. This is fortunate, because when explaining biblical types to academics, as opposed to children, one is repeatedly forced to start from scratch. From birth, a healthy child is attuned to rhythm and…
In an inverse Eden, a land laid waste, one works alone tending the trash. There are none like him in all the earth, inquisitive, playful and most drawn to those mysterious, dancing bipedal creatures who lost earth and left it to go wandering the vast wilderness of space. Humans have…
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Barth insists, rightly, that the incarnation doesn’t express any “need” or lack on God’s part, but is rather His free gracious response to the “radical neediness of the world.” Taking on that neediness also means taking up our cause. He comes to maintain and carry through humanity’s cause to victory.…
Protestants often claim that our sinfulness is manifest in our efforts to earn God’s favor by our works. That is true, but it doesn’t quite get at the most grievous root of sin. Barth is more penetrating in saying that our sinfulness is manifest in our efforts to usurp God’s…
Charles Morris (in The Trillion Dollar Meltdown ) says that one of the dangerous trends emerging in the 80s and 90s, and lurking behind the current financial crisis, is the “increased dominance of investment decisions by mathematical constructs.” He admits that “Large securities portfolios usually do behave more or less…
Jesus spits on the ground, makes clay of the spittle, and “applies” the clay to the eyes of a blind man (John 9; NASB). The verb behind “apply” is epichrio . Its only other usage in the NT is five verses later, where the NASB translates the very same form…
John is aware of linguistic diversity, translating unusual Hebrew terms into Greek (e.g., “Messiah” into “Christ,” 1:42). This is perhaps for the convenience of Greek readers, but there is likely also a theological reason: John proclaims the incarnate Word, and describes the work and words of that Word with words…
John tells us that the inscription “Jesus the Nazarene, the King of the Jews” was placed above his head on the cross in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek (19:19-20). But this is just the culmination of a text that, though written in Greek, contains a number of cross-linguistic terms. Twice in…
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