Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
(continued from previous issue) Between 30 and 50 What did the Levites do between age 30 and 50? Numbers 4 shows us that they carried the house of God on their shoulders. Lifting up the Lord is an image of worship in the Bible, and David’s restructuring of the Levites…
When God created the world, He created two lands: the Throne-land of Eden (entered through the sanctuary-garden, the Garden of Eden), and the Outlying Lands, such as the lands of Havilah and Cush. This essentially bi-polar world is the world of the Old Creation, and it continued to exist until…
Color is inescapable, except for those who are color blind. In our church architecture, we either employ color schemes that are helpful to worship, or we employ color schemes that are not helpful. Of course, this assertion merely begs the question: What color schemes are most helpful. God showed interest…
As I noted in an earlier article in Rite Reasons , the Church Fathers Tertullian, Ambrose, and Augustine all claimed that baptism inducts the baptized person into membership in the royal priesthood of the church, and Thomas Aquinas said that baptism, by imprinting an indelible “character” on the soul, confers…
When the Aaronic priests were ordained, the blood of the ram of "filling” was placed on the lobe of the right ear, the right thumb, and the right big toe (Lev. 8:22-24). Similarly, the cleansing rite for a leper included smearing the right ear lobe, thumb, and big toe with…
In my Preliminary Commentary on Daniel , which many of you have obtained, I argued in chapter 13 that the four monsters called up from the sea by the evangelistic work of the four winds (the saints) represented the deep hatred of God that evangelistic work brings to the fore…
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The notion that the Democrats would select Hillary Clinton as their candidate has always seemed suicidal to me. Why run a candidate who immediately alienates a large proportion of the voting population? Bill Clinton’s prominence in the race makes Hillary’s candidacy seem all the more suicidal. His legacy as President…
Patterson provides a neat summary of three popular theories of festive comedy. All attempt to locate the play socially, in some setting of festivity. First, some suggest that Shakespeare paid a compliment to Elizabeth since she was in the original audience, an audience for a noble wedding, alluded to in…
A historicist angle comes out in Patterson’s discussion of the passage in 2.1.155-64, where Theseus describes the origin of the flower that Puck squeezes into the eyes of the lovers. Since the late 19 th century, critics have seen here a veiled reference to Elizabeth, who escaped Cupid’s arrow and…
In an essay on MSND entitled “Bottom’s Up: Festive Theory,” Annabel Patterson lays a historicist treatment of the play that relies in equal parts on Barber’s theory of festive comedy, Victor Turner’s studies of ritual, and Bakhtin’s theory of comedy and subversion. Here are some notes on her main themes:…
In his recent commentary on Daniel, Jim Jordan notes that the goat of Alexandrian Egypt (Daniel 8) is something new in Israel’s history - a power coming from the West: “Israel has always been the west-most power, with the Mediterranean Sea at her edge. All previous history has been involved…
Bakhtin wrote that laughter “liberated, to a certain extent, from censorship, oppression, and from the stake. But . . . laughter is essentially not an external but an interior form of truth . . . . Laughter liberates not only from exterior censorship but first of all from the great…
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