Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Christmas is a joyful season, but for many it turns into something else. Instead of joy, it is full of disappointment and unhappiness. Instead of an occasion for family fellowship, it becomes an opportunity for opening old wounds, reigniting old arguments, giving new life to rancor that should have died…
The Temple of Time The “covenant-literary matrix” of the Bible is not a pattern imposed upon the text, but the internal logic of its arrangement. This fundamental structure, functioning at multiple levels simultaneously, is a ceaseless reiteration of God’s primary theme. It is an algorithm forged in the furnace of…
In the four hundred and eightieth year after the Exodus, Solomon began to build the temple of the Lord in Jerusalem. [1] That the author of Kings should date the start of the building of the temple from the Exodus is noteworthy. In Exodus 15:17, in Moses’ song following the…
Philip Schaff, a German Reformed theologian, states in The Principle of Protestantism that the material principle of Protestantism is “the doctrine of the justification of the sinner before God by the merit of Christ alone through faith.” This is the core message of the Church which leads “to the abandonment…
“Religion” is an attempt to create or build a tower with a top, or to build a temple that is self-contained. The story of The Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 is the story of mankind’s attempt to create a world that is self-contained and does not need God. All…
In the first essay in this series, I presented a case for dating Matthew before AD 70, contrary to the present scholarly consensus. In this essay, I intend to present cultural, personal, ecclesiological, and theological arguments for a very early date for Matthew. [1] The cultural argument concerns literacy in…
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It has been customary since the middle ages to define sacrifice in terms of death. To sacrifice is to give something over to destruction. Roy Gane points out in his Cult and Character that this does not conform to the biblical usage. The bread of the presence is described as…
In a 1997 review in First Things, Andrew McKenna suggests that Derrida’s most important contribution might ultimately be to deconstruct philosophy so thoroughly that one is left only with theology: “the Sermon on the Mount performs a critique of difference to which any deconstructor can subscribe. Subject to serious misuses,…
Jordan’s reflections on “leprosy” help to explain why Miriam, and not Aaron, becomes leprous in Numbers 12. Jordan notes that the term for “plague” used in Leviticus 13 is actually “touch,” and suggests that the leper is “touched” by Yahweh, sometimes in response to sacrilege, a violation of God’s holiness.…
Jordan’s reflections on “leprosy” help to explain why Miriam, and not Aaron, becomes leprous in Numbers 12. Jordan notes that the term for “plague” used in Leviticus 13 is actually “touch,” and suggests that the leper is “touched” by Yahweh, sometimes in response to sacrilege, a violation of God’s holiness.…
In his stimulating essay on Leviticus 13 (available from Biblical Horizons), Jim Jordan reflects on the fact that a white hair in the flesh makes a man unclean. White hair is associated with glory, and so the uncleanness results from the contradiction between glorification and flesh. The unclean “leper” is…
Robyn Horner helpfully expounds on Derrida’s deconstruction of the gift by considering whether the text can be construed as a gift. In a section of Given Time , Derrida discusses a text by Baudelaire, noting that it is a given “not only because we are first of all in a…
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