Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The preceding essay has caused me to consider the possibility that the life of Abraham as recounted in Genesis contains a typological prophecy of the history of Israel; that is, that the events in Abraham’s life broadly anticipate events in Israel’s history. This kind of pattern is seen in the…
by: Jeff Meyers and James Jordan In the fifth chapter of John’s gospel we read of a man who had been ill for 38 years and who was lying by a pool located by the Sheep Gate of Jerusalem. This sheep waited, as did many other infirm people, for an…
What had been reduced to ruin by this sex, would by the selfsame sex be recovered to salvation. As Eve believed the serpent, so Mary believed the angel. The delinquency which the one occasioned by believing, the other by believing effaced. —Tertullian What is Paul saying about women and salvation…
Back in Biblical Horizons 132 I discussed the horrible abuse of the converted men of Salem/Shechem in Genesis 34. These Hivites had joined the covenant by circumcision and then were slaughtered by Simeon and Levi. That, however, is not the end of their story. In Joshua 9 we find the…
Genesis 14:14 says that Abram mustered his trained men, “born in his house,” to rescue Lot, and gives their number as 318. It is clear that the precise number is provided for some reason, but what is it? S. Gevirtz notes that 318 is the sum of all the prime…
Simon Peter went up, and drew the net to land, full of large fish, a hundred and fifty-three; and although there were so many, the net was not torn. (John 21:11) This is one of those texts in the Bible that many people puzzle over. It is not a puzzle…
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James Jordan points out in an essay on the Ascension offering that the early chapter of Genesis follow a sacrificial sequence: Sacrifice outside the garden, then Enoch ascends to the Lord, then the world is washed in the flood, and finally Noah joins his forefather on a high place. This…
Michael Oakeshott says that the university provides one central gift, the “gift of the interval”: Here was an opportunity to put aside the hot allegiances of youth without the necessity of acquiring new loyalties to take their place. Here was an interval in which a man might refuse to commit…
In his social history of Christian Worship, Frank Senn summarizes the developments of the medieval period with regard to the Eucharist. He begins by challenging the assumption that medieval society was held together by “the church.” He notes that the church was often divided and conflicted, and that there were…
Eucharistic prayers were eventually removed almost entirely from the Eucharistic celebration, so that the church ended up, as Louis Bouyer has provocatively put it, “a eucharist in which there is no longer and eucharist at all properly speaking.” To grasp what Bouyer is saying, it is helpful to cite some…
Christoph Schwobel has a dense but helpful overview of Pannenberg’s theology in David Ford’s The Modern Theologians. Pannenberg insists from the beginning of his career that history is revelation, and his whole theology is an effort to hammer out the implications of that claim. Like Barth, he insists that revelation…
In his book on the Trinity, Veli-Matti Karkkainen has a concise summary of Pannenberg’s Trinitarian theology. He begins by noting that Pannenberg’s entire program for theology is to establish the “truth of Christian doctrine.” Theology is a public discipline that aims to establish universal truth claims. He protests against the…
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