Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
"Vanity of vanities", says the Preacher. "All is vanity". Life, we are told in the book of Ecclesiastes, is a repetitious, wearisome cycle; all that is and all that will be has already been. There is nothing new under the sun. What is crooked cannot be made straight, what is…
The Bible tells us that when God created the earth, He set up three zones of life. The first was the world itself. The second was the holy land of Eden. And the third was the Garden in Eden, God’s sanctuary. God told Adam and Eve that every tree was…
In our survey of Biblical chronology we have arrived at the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, which provide chronological information for the period after the return from exile, the Restoration Period of Old Testament history. The question we begin to address in this essay is whether the Artaxerxes of these…
These verses from the Sermon on the Mount are generally taken in connection with Jesus’ earlier statement concerning adultery in the heart (vv. 27-28); the eye and the hand have obvious relevance to the sin of adultery. At the same time, most commentators admit that the principle of avoiding occasions…
17. The eye that mocks a father, And despises to obey a mother, The ravens of the valley will pick it out, And the young eagles will eat it. 18. There are three things that are too wonderful for me, Four that I do not understand: 19. The way of…
The modern Church in America and virtually everywhere else is ideology-centered, not geographical. This is because various Churches believe different things and have different customs of worship and sacraments. The ideological Church has gradually developed from the time of the Reformation, because accuracy of doctrine has become more important to…
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Early in Ward’s book, he surveys mid sixteenth-century treatments of the effects of Adam’s sin, mainly to determine whether writers of that period conceived of God’s relationship with Adam as a covenantal one. His evidence suggests several important conclusions: 1) The early Protestant confessions do not describe Adam’s relationship to…
In his very useful study, God & Adam: Reformed Theology and the Creation Covenant , Rowland S. Ward has this to say about Meredith Kline’s views on the un-gracious character of the covenant of works: “Contrary to his position in 1968, Kline does not wish now to admit any concept…
I should clarify my final, hurried comments on Brown’s discussion of sin and bad taste. I suggested at the end of the last post that Brown’s initial mapping of the problem contributes to an unsatisfying conclusion regarding moral and aesthetic judgment. Brown argues that taste is community-specific, and thus subject…
One of the challenges of a Christian aesthetics is sorting through the connections and distinctions between holiness and good taste on the one hand, and sin and bad taste on the other. In his 1989 book, Religious Aesthetics , Frank Burch Brown offers some thoughtful reflections on this question. Here…
Don Richardson’s Peace Child is a classic of modern mission writing. In that book, Richardson tells of his experience among the Sawi people of New Guinea, and how he used their traditional custom of exchanging a “peace child” between warring tribes to explain the gospel to them. In his 1981…
When the men of Babel organize to build a tower reaching to heaven, they decide to use “tar for mortar” (Gen 11:3; NASB). The Hebrew phrase repeats two different forms of the same root word (CHMR): The word for “tar” is CHEMAR and the word for “mortar” is CHOMER. They…
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