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Writing

Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.

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Apostle Paul

Jonah’s Pauline Move: Finding Mercy for Gentiles in Texts about Mercy for Israel

Jonah is Paul’s typological opposite. Indeed, in the whole Old Testament, it would be difficult to find a more perfect foil to Paul than Jonah. Whereas Paul crosses the sea to enact God’s saving purposes for the Gentiles, Jonah crosses the sea to avoid bringing Gentiles God’s mercy. For that…

by Josh JensenJanuary 11, 2024
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Family

A House for Me

Years ago, I realized that if my children wanted to feel like their house was a home, I needed to be intentional about making our physical shelter a place of spiritual refuge. I began to see the Holy Spirit as the indwelling person of the Trinity—the one who makes His…

by Mandi GerthJanuary 9, 2024
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Charity

On Parrhesia and Gospel Witness

When the crowds encircle Christ in Solomon’s Porch during the Festival of Dedication, they charge him: “tell us boldly who you are!” 1 They do not draw-up to him to with excited anticipation as they did earlier in the Gospel, 2 instead they flank him like a gang of wolves.…

by Mark BriansJanuary 4, 2024
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Deuteronomy

Misunderstanding Moses

1 In Deuteronomy 7:1-5, Moses wrote: When Yahweh your God brings you into the land which you go to possess, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations…

by Ralph Allan SmithJanuary 3, 2024
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Advent

40 Theses on Christmas

Every Advent witnesses the gruesome reanimation of the voice that whispers “you know , Christmas is just a pagan holiday…” with that sort of conversational ellipsis that does not so much invite further reflection but halts and forecloses it. The claims are several and equally spurious: Jesus wasn’t born on…

by Mark BriansDecember 26, 2023
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Genesis

The Twelve Trials of Abraham

Abraham's life in Genesis is a series of trials. He travels hundreds of miles from his family into a new land, flees from a famine into the hands of a king who takes his wife, and after returning, has to rescue his brother from a war. He's involved with two…

by Donald LinnemeyerDecember 26, 2023

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Early Higher Critics

In his recent commentary on Daniel, Jim Jordan suggests that the modern notion that Josiah and his priests wrote “the book of the law” they claimed to discover in the temple was likely shared by people of Josiah’s time: “The image-users of the high places had always resented the official,…

March 18, 2008
Literature

For and Against Cromwell

Harold Bloom (in The Visionary Company ) writes that just as “French culture has been divided between those who have accepted the French Revolution and its consequences and those who have sought to deny and resist them,” so English culture is “divided between those who have accepted the Puritan religious…

March 17, 2008

Trinitarian reading

In her book on Joachim of Fiore, Marjorie Reeves notes that Joachim insists on diligent study of both testaments as the means for reaching the Spiritual interpretation: “The relationship is clearly a Trinitarian one: in Joachim’s phrase, the Spiritualis intellectus proceeds from both the Testaments, just as the Spirit proceeds…

March 17, 2008

Nero Revived

In the first of his Dialogues , the fifth-century Christian writer Sulpicius Severus said that “there is no doubt that Antichrist, conceived by an evil spirit, has already been born.” He spelled out his expectations for the future: Nero and the Antichrist would come, Nero ruling in the west and…

March 17, 2008
History

Prophet and priest

According to Weber, personal charisma was the key distinguishing feature of prophetic office, and also the feature that most clearly separated prophets from priests: :”the prophet declares new revelations by charisma, whereas the priest serves to a sacred tradition. It is no accident that almost no prophet has come from…

March 17, 2008
Theology

Naming God

Feminist theology overtly objects to masculine names for God, but Christopher Seitz says that the debate goes much deeper: “what is at stake in modern debates is not whether God is father or can be addressed as ‘he.’ Rather, what is at stake is whether we are entitled to call…

March 17, 2008

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