Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
WHAT IS THE OT PRECURSOR OF THE NT OFFICE OF PASTOR? HOW DOES THE FORMER ILLUMINATE THE LATTER? The first problem to address is: how do we know that there is an office of pastor in the New Testament? 1 Perhaps the way the question is put may permit me…
[This essay was originally published in December, 1981, in The Biblical Educator , a publication of the Institute for Christian Economics, and again with slight revisions in Contra Mundum 7 (Spring, 1993). It is reprinted here as a supplement to my book Creation in Six Days .] In 1979, Dr.…
Anyone seeking to reverse the meaning of this promise needs to come to grips not only with the phrase "God was with the lad" later on, but also with Hagar’s response in 16:13. She worships Yahweh, putting her trust in Him and obeying Him. In fact, Hagar is at the…
Ishmael is the narrator of Melville’s fantasy-romance Moby Dick. Melville takes up the traditional view of Ishmael as a wayward son of Abraham, driven out solely because of the Divine "caprice" of election, an angry man with his hand raised against all other men. He is a fitting "anti-hero," or…
There were five cities at the center of the Canaanite culture in the circle of the Jordan, a place like the Garden of Eden, like the land of Egypt, before it became the Dead Sea at the destruction of the cities (Genesis 13:10). Genesis 14:2 tells us their names: Sodom,…
Meditations by James B. Jordan Genesis 19, the destruction of Sodom and the rescue of Lot, is part two of a story that begins in Genesis 18. These two chapters happen in one 24-hour period: noon and evening in Mamre, and midnight and daybreak in Sodom. God and two angels…
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According to Fergus Kerr, it was Bonaventure, not Thomas, who first employed the axiom “grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it,” in his commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences.
Markus wants to distinguish between the fact that people who act in the public realm always act with ultimate ends in view, and that their actions are either moral or immoral from the notion that there is a neutral public space. The public sphere, he claims, shouldn’t be thought of…
RA Markus (Christianity and the Secular) argues that as the church celebrated the triumph of Christianity in the fourth century, they also wanted to maintain their continuity with the church that gave them birth - the persecuted church of the martyrs: “The great need felt by Christians of the post-Constantinian…
Charles Taylor has suggested that secularism was an “exit strategy” from religious conflict. There were two exit strategies. In the summary by RA Markus, “The first, ‘the common ground strategy,’ assumes a certain range of beliefs shared by all Christians (or all theists) and minimises or eliminates confessional differences that…
John Locke drew up the basic contours of the modern conception of religion as internal and private in his “Letter Concerning Toleration.” He made a sharp distinction between religious and civil realms: “The end of a religious society, as has already been said, is the public worship of God, and,…
Comments primarily on Aquinas on Gratitude/Ingratitude (primarily ST, II-II, qs 106-7). Aquinas describes gratitude as a virtue “annexed” to justice, and so to understand his discussion of gratitude, we must get some handle on what he means by justice. In ST II-II, q. 58, he describes justice as a virtue.…
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