Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I grew up in the 1950s. This was before the "Sixties" and the democratization, informalization, and general cheapening of the church and her worship. Ministers were Father Donovan, Pastor Eckhart, Reverend MacPherson, Mister (Episcopal) Parker, and Brother Smith. Liturgical speech was high language, sounding kind of like the King James…
Metaphor exerts a surprisingly powerful influence within our thinking. Although it is easily dismissed as little more than a figure of speech, when we attend more closely to the ways in which we use it, metaphor’s importance swiftly becomes more apparent. Although many of our metaphors have become quite invisible…
What is a tree, scientifically speaking? A mere googling gives the following answer: “a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground.” We can increase detail by describing its family, genus, species and…
The majority of Western evangelical Christians rarely, if ever, fast as a form of spiritual discipline. In our culture, fasting is more connected with dieting than worship, the other side of our deeply ambiguous fascination with food. Food is everywhere. We eat more than ever before, at greater speed, and…
A Grammar of Creation An understanding of the visual-musical language of the Bible must begin with Genesis 1. This is fortunate, because when explaining biblical types to academics, as opposed to children, one is repeatedly forced to start from scratch. From birth, a healthy child is attuned to rhythm and…
In an inverse Eden, a land laid waste, one works alone tending the trash. There are none like him in all the earth, inquisitive, playful and most drawn to those mysterious, dancing bipedal creatures who lost earth and left it to go wandering the vast wilderness of space. Humans have…
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Douglas Oakman’s Jesus, Debt, and the Lord’s Prayer spends an inordinate amount of space on source-critical questions concerning the Lord’s prayer. His claim that “Jesus was attempting to mitigate the situation of the indebted (‘sinner’) by promoting the subversion of the imperial tax system in Galilee” (100) is unconvincing. His…
Timothy Carson thinks the number one is a “giddy” number, “delighted in its unity, ecstatic about its own irreducible, undivided self” ( The Square Root of God , 10). It has good reason to be giddy. It is “always a component of, a part of everything else, no matter how…
The opening verses of Proverbs describe the aims of wisdom, its purposes and gifts. The same verses also point to the source of wisdom: Where is skill in living well to be found? Where do we get training and instruction in this art? Ultimately, wisdom has its source in Yahweh.…
P aul reminds the Corinthians that those who served the altar shared in the proceeds of the altar, and applies that model to the church’s responsibility to support minsters of the gospel. That means that the Levitical system of paying priests (cf. Leviticus 7–8; Numbers 18) provides a model for…
Jesus begins the sermon on the mount with the Beatitudes, which are phrased in third person: Blessed are the poor in Spirit, for theirs is the kingdom; blessed are those . . . , for they. That continues through verse 10. Then Jesus basically repeats verse 10, but with a…
God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all, John tells us. What might that mean? God is an eternal fellowship of light, eternal source, eternal radiance, and eternal dispersion that illumines the source and radiance. Light gives life. Nothing can live without light. To say that God…
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