Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
During one of my AAPC lectures I read a portion of Richard Mitchell’s provocative little book The Underground Grammarian . Here’s the portion I read: The mind is a rudderless wanderer blown here or there by any puff of breeze. If I mention watermelons, you must think of watermelons; if…
This is the donation thank-you essay for January 2008. Our studies in the Psalms go out month by month in response to donations. I’m putting this one up here as an example, and also because the version I actually mailed out contained several egregious arithmetical errors! So, here is the…
Part 1: Introduction The collapse of the Western tradition in the United States, seen in the hostility to Christianity in government and education, and the elimination of “traditional” or “canon” learning from our institutions of middle and higher learning, provides a crisis and an opportunity for serious believers at the…
While “forgiving oneself” is widely accepted in the secular world as a legitimate and needful thing to do, Christians are rightly suspicious. After all, God is the one who forgives. When we sin against other people, we need to seek their forgiveness, not our own. Nevertheless after looking at Vine’s…
This was originally published as HIStory in the column, “A Pastor’s Perspective” in Ligonier Ministrie’s Tabletalk Magazine . I am not sure of the date but it was probably published in 1999 or 2000. Quick! What’s the basic message of the Bible? Summarize it in as few words as possible…
A Brief Explanation of What a Presbytery Is & Why Pastors in Presbyterian Denominations are Members of Them A belief in the primacy of the local congregation of the Church, I think, reflects the gut feeling of most North American Evangelicals. As a result, the form of Church government universally…
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For us, hospitality usually means entertaining. It means having our friends and neighbors and church members into the home. Sometimes, in our world, it involves jockeying for position and power by showing hospitality to the right kinds of people. That’s how the rich and famous create and sustain the aura…
The London Times fulminates: “It is quite sufficient to cast one’s eyes on the voluptuous intertwining of the limbs, and close compressure of the bodies, in this dance, to see that it is far indeed removed from the modest reserve which has hitherto been considered distinctive of English females. So…
Marilyn McCord Adams ( Christ and Horrors , Cambridge, 2006) proposes to demonstrate the coherence of Christology not by starting with sin and explaining how Christ has dealt with sin, but by starting with “horrors” and asking, What must Christ be and do if He is going to rescue us…
In her book on medieval Bible scholarship, Beryl Smalley notes that “Alexandrian exegesis penetrated to the Latin middle ages, when knowledge of Greek had declined, by two main channels: indirectly through the Latin Fathers and directly through translations of Origen’s works. Rufinus’ translations of some of his homilies were used…
Philo thought of allegory as a means for universalizing Jewish history and law, analogous to the way the Roman world had fused all peoples into a single empire. Literalists are “citizens of a petty state,” while allegorists are “on the roll of citizens of a greater country, namely, this whole…
Why did God create the world in six days? Philo said that 6 is the perfect number, both the sum and the product of its factors, which happen to be the first three integers (1, 2, 3). But there’s more: “We may say that [6] is in its nature both…
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