Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Suppose that the theistic evolutionists are right, and that the Big Bang Hypothesis is correct. In that case, God originally created a Primeval Atom, which then exploded and congealed to form the present universe. Now, if you had arrived on the scene one quintillionth of a second after God created…
According to Galatians 3, Abraham heard the gospel when the Lord promised that "all the nations shall be blessed in you." Paul quotes here from Genesis 12:3, but the context puts an odd slant on the Old Testament text. Galatians 3 starts with a series of rhetorical questions about the…
Ephesians 2.15: ton vomon twv enotwn en dogmasin katargesas, ina tous duo ktise en autw eis ena kainon anthrwpon, poiwn eirenen having annulled the law of the commandments in decrees, in order that He might create in Him[self] the two into one new man, making peace. The above translation is…
In The Oddness of the Feast of Booths , we saw that the Feast of Booths is a commemoration of the first encampment of Israel at Sukkoth (Booths) in Exodus 12:37, almost certainly the first celebration of the week of Unleavened Bread after the first Passover. The Feast of Booths…
James Jordan has pointed out in Through New Eyes and elsewhere that the Mosaic system of worship comes to an end with the dismemberment of the tabernacle in 1 Samuel 4-6. Because of the sins of Eli and his sons, that priestly family is cut off and the ark is…
In a significant essay in the 19 April 1999 issue of The Weekly Standard, entitled "Wars of Hatred and the Hatred of War," Charles H. Fairbanks, Jr., points out a significant shift that seems to be taking place in the modern world. He begins by asserting his thesis, that a…
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Thanks to Jayson Grieser for sending along notes and quotations from Ramie Targoff’s 2001 Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England . Targoff points out that, contrary to what we might think, Protestants were more interested than Catholics in communal worship. “For sixteenth-century Catholics,” she writes,…
Calvin is harsher on allegorical interpretation than almost anyone, yet he is all in favor of typology. David, Zedekiah, Joseph, Aaron, Samson, Joshua, Zerubbabel, Cyrus and others are types of Christ. It is no easy task to discover where he draws the line between allegory and typology, though. At times,…
“Yahweh” is often thought to be a purely modern rendering of the Hebrew name, but Smalley finds a medieval glossator who writes the name as “Iahave.” She goes on: “The ‘monstrous form’ Jehoveh was already known to Christians in the late thirteenth century. Henry Crossy seems to compromise between Jehoveh…
Aquinas rejected Augustine’s dismisal of literal interpretations of the law as “absurdities,” arguing that “the end of the ceremonial precepts was twofold, for they were ordained to divine worship, for that particular time, and to the foreshadowing of Christ.” Applying this principle, he sought for a plausible literal interpretation of…
Aquinas rejected Augustine’s dismisal of literal interpretations of the law as “absurdities,” arguing that “the end of the ceremonial precepts was twofold, for they were ordained to divine worship, for that particular time, and to the foreshadowing of Christ.” Applying this principle, he sought for a plausible literal interpretation of…
Following Jewish exegetes of his time, Andrew of St. Victor interpreted Isaiah 53 as a prophecy of Israel. Isaiah used the phrase “man of sorrows” to speak “of the people as though of one man.” “Bearing infirmities” refers to “the people who were to suffer in the Babylonian captivity” and…
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