Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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Doctrine matters, and no doctrines matter more than the doctrines concerning Jesus Christ. We can test every other doctrinal concern this way: What does it say about Jesus? One of the earliest heresies was “docetism,” which comes from the Greek verb for “seem.” Docetists believed that Jesus was not truly…
Ruth Fox points out how the Roman Catholic lectionary deletes passages that have to do with heroic women. This happens so consistently that even the most anti-feminist reader has to get a tad suspicious. Among the more egregious examples is this one: “A survey of the lectionary reveals that the…
Naomi is as central to Ruth as the title character. She’s the one emptied, then filled; bereft and restored; dead and risen again. The son of Boaz and Ruth is “Naomi’s son,” and this chiastically matches (as several of my students have pointed out) her loss of sons at the…
Naomi is as central to Ruth as the title character. She’s the one emptied, then filled; bereft and restored; dead and risen again. The son of Boaz and Ruth is “Naomi’s son,” and this chiastically matches (as several of my students have pointed out) her loss of sons at the…
The rhyming Hebrew phrase reyach niychoach (“soothing aroma”) is used frequently in Leviticus in conjunction with ishshah (“fire offering” or “food offering”; this combination found in Leviticus 1:13, 17; 2:2, 9; 3:5, 16). reyach niychoach is found without i shshah in Leviticus 4:31; 6:8, 14. Two things suggest that the…
Hegel’s erotic Trinity seeks the other out of need and lack, an indeterminacy that the other determines. What, however, if we think of the Triune love as arising from plentitude rather than lack? One immediate result is that the other is affirmed: “is this not what agapeic love does: releases…
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