Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Along His journey to Jerusalem, Jesus stops frequently to have meals, three times with Pharisees (7:37-50; 11:37-54; 14:1-35). Meals were central to Jesus’ ministry. He comes “eating and drinking” (Luke 7:34). While His meals are not just for refreshment, they are opportunities for teaching the protocols of the kingdom. Meals…
Time as a realm of participation can be difficult for us imaginatively to grasp. While music is a profoundly temporal art, exploring the medium of time like no other, most of our temporal experience seems decidedly unmusical in character, disjointed and unorchestrated. The form in which we naturally discover time…
John devotes much attention to Jesus’ burial clothes. He tells us that Nicodemus brought about a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes to spice Jesus body, and that He was bound in linen wrappings. We find out that His body and His head were wrapped separately. (John 19:39-40; 20:6-7). When…
Thinking about time in terms of music also helps us to appreciate its unity and inner relations. Henri Bergson observes our cultural habit of dividing time into discrete moments, and conceiving of these as if akin to objects in a spatial succession. [1] Against such a notion, Bergson argues for…
As we attend to these and other aspects of music’s temporality, Begbie suggests, we will find means by which to resist some of our habitual modern ways of conceptualizing time, most especially our tendency to conceive of time as if it were a homogeneous set of technologically quantifiable units laid…
The Hidden Dimension In many fields of scientific study, the apparent complications and contradictions are dispelled once the internal logic is perceived. Biblical hermeneutics is no different, since the author of Creation is the Author of the Word. The Bible’s literary labyrinth radiates organically from an algorithm so simple it…
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Anything by Ross Douthat is worth reading. In the current issue of First Things , he examines the role of religion in several TV programs - Battlestar Gallactic a, Lost , and The Sopranos . He notes that the island in Lost is a “microcosm of Western modernity (many of…
INTRODUCTION Through the Spirit that comes upon Mary, God enters the creation to renew it. In Jesus, God is with His people to save them from their sins. THE TEXT :Now the birth of Jesus Christ was as follows: After His mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph, before they came…
Matthew 1:17: So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; from David to the deportation to Babylon, fourteen generations; and from the deportation to Babylon to the Messiah, fourteen generations. Last week, we noticed that Matthew begins his gospel using the title of the first book of…
Twice in his genealogy, Matthew refers to “brothers.” Jacob was the father of “Judah and his brothers,” and at the time of the deportation to Babylon “Jeconiah and his brothers” were born to Josiah. This initiates a theme in Matthew’s gospel, the theme of the church as a brotherhood. Alongside…
In an article from New Testament Studies on the names in Matthew’s genealogy, Karl-Heinrich Ostmeyer suggests that the names in the last section of the genealogy are predominately priestly names. Thus, the genealogy divides into a patriarchal section, a royal section, and a priestly section, which culminates with Jesus. Further,…
Matthew tells us the story of a new Genesis, a new beginnings story. And then he gives a genealogy that includes 6 weeks of generations (14 x 6 = 6 x 7), and announces the beginning of a seventh week. The history of Israel is numerologically shaped on the model…
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