Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
[This essay was originally published in 1988. Given the situation that our new national socialists are getting the world into, I thought it might be useful to reprint it here. – JBJordan] The Bible has quite a bit to say about gold, silver, and precious stones, and the Bible always…
I wrote this elsewhere and was encouraged to put it here. It is a comment on what a pastor is. Today, this is not very well understood, and God’s people suffer because of it. There are four professions: medicine, education, law, and religion. Each of these, when done at a…
James Jordan recently pointed out in private conversation how appropriate it is, in John’s Gospel, that Nicodemus is present both to ask Jesus about being born again, and to see Jesus re-enter the womb of the mother. Nicodemus rhetorically asks, “How can a man be born when he is old?…
This is a problematic and much discussed passage. I’ve been discussing it in another forum, and have decided to move it here and present some very preliminary observations about it. One large question is this: Who is the speaker here and what is his situation? Traditionally, the speaker is seen…
1. The current issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction includes a good fantasy novella by John C. Wright, who since his conversion has been writing Christianly. This is a fine fantasy with nods to C. S. Lewis and Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and probably Gene Wolfe as well.…
“It is an experience of our days that the spoken name of Jesus alone exercises an unforeseen power; and the effort which it cost to speak this name is perhaps connected to some faint apprehension of the power which is inherent within it. Wherever the name of Jesus Christ is…
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The “do Muslims and Christians worship the same God?” controversy surges on, reported most recently in the Economist . It's worth revisiting. In an earlier post, I charged that the claim that Muslims and Christians worship the same God (what I will call the “identity theory”) implicitly denies a central…
In an article on Revelation, J. Daryl Charles observes that the Roman Empire “had brought about the ‘solution' - ‘salvation' for the human race - and was thus worthy of popular adoration. Empire-adoration necessitated a personal symbol which the ancient city-state could not generate. In the Imperial cult resided the…
In his packed little book, Theology and the Spaces of Apocalyptic , Cyril O'Regan observes that “there seems to be a binary opposition in the modern world between apocalyptic and the discipline of theology” (15). Heterodox apocalyptic is everywhere, in Milton and Blake and Romanticism, among Hegelians, especially those on…
G. Biguzzi asks whether the city “Babylon” (Revelation 17-18) represents Rome or Jerusalem. The first option was presented early, by Victorinus. He “(i) gives the circumlocution, ‘city of Rome,' as toe equivalent of Babylon: . . . ruina Babylonis, id est civitatis Romanae, (ii) identifies the seven mountains of Rev…
Medieval biblical scholars read Scripture through the lens of the quadriga, fourfold sense of Scripture. Texts had a literal sense, an allegorical or Christological sense, a tropological or moral sense, and an anagogical sense. In his recent study of de Lubac, Between Apocalypse and Eschaton , Joseph Flipper focuses on…
Here's some seasoned advice to young scholars on how to write an introduction. 1. Write the book first. You don't know what the book is about until you finish it, and you can't introduce what you don't know. This may seem backwards, but it is inevitable, because a thing is…
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