Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Christmas is a joyful season, but for many it turns into something else. Instead of joy, it is full of disappointment and unhappiness. Instead of an occasion for family fellowship, it becomes an opportunity for opening old wounds, reigniting old arguments, giving new life to rancor that should have died…
The Temple of Time The “covenant-literary matrix” of the Bible is not a pattern imposed upon the text, but the internal logic of its arrangement. This fundamental structure, functioning at multiple levels simultaneously, is a ceaseless reiteration of God’s primary theme. It is an algorithm forged in the furnace of…
In the four hundred and eightieth year after the Exodus, Solomon began to build the temple of the Lord in Jerusalem. [1] That the author of Kings should date the start of the building of the temple from the Exodus is noteworthy. In Exodus 15:17, in Moses’ song following the…
Philip Schaff, a German Reformed theologian, states in The Principle of Protestantism that the material principle of Protestantism is “the doctrine of the justification of the sinner before God by the merit of Christ alone through faith.” This is the core message of the Church which leads “to the abandonment…
“Religion” is an attempt to create or build a tower with a top, or to build a temple that is self-contained. The story of The Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 is the story of mankind’s attempt to create a world that is self-contained and does not need God. All…
In the first essay in this series, I presented a case for dating Matthew before AD 70, contrary to the present scholarly consensus. In this essay, I intend to present cultural, personal, ecclesiological, and theological arguments for a very early date for Matthew. [1] The cultural argument concerns literacy in…
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Roy Gane’s detailed, technical Cult and Character is a sustained response to Jacob Milgrom’s claim that the purification offers of the Torah did not cleanse the worshiper who offered them but the sanctuary. Gane’s overall argument is convincing, and he makes a lot of intriguing exegetical points along the way.…
Ben Meyer ( The Aims of Jesus , 132) summarizes Jesus message as consisting of two themes: The kingdom of God is a free gift; and it has come in Jesus’ own ministry. Jesus preaches a kingdom that is free and now . It is a demanding kingdom. The free…
In a 2006 article in Past & Present , Jonathan Sheehan traces the origins of the modern contrast of sacred and profane to seventeenth-century dispute about idolatry. It’s a story of keen interest, but this particularly caught my eye. He’s talking about the role of the golden calf incident in…
Like another, better-known Jesuit, Robert Daly has a disarming way about him. What do you do with a Catholic who is as critical of private Masses as most Protestants? A Jesuit who says things like: “It is common to describe lack of contact with tradition as one of the characteristic…
Nancy Jay’s analysis of the patriarchal narratives in Throughout Your Generations Forever is vitiated (to use a solid old Calvinian term) by her reliance on the documentary hypothesis. P says this, J and E that. P traces smooth sacrificial descent from fathers to sons; J and E reveal a more…
Anointing the sick, including the dying, is one of the traditional seven sacraments of the Catholic Church. The Reformers denied that the rite qualified as a sacrament. Formally, this was because anointing did not have a direct authorization from Jesus; more theologically, it was not one of the marks that…
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