Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Should anthropological categories and tools be applied to Judaism? Seems a narrow and academic question, of interest to maybe ten people on the planet. It's one of the many virtues of Howard Eilberg-Schwartz's 1990 The Savage In Judaism to show that the question is a central one in the origins…
Christians are often accused of being obsessed with sexual sin. Why can't two people, of whatever sex, do whatever they please in the enclosure of their own room? Who is hurt if a guy wants to get off looking at tantalizing pictures and videos on his computer? What's the big…
“No one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man. And then he will plunder his house” (Mark 3:27 NKJV). Much commentary on the Revelation seems oblivious to its allusions to the Pentateuch (although there are many that do enlighten us…
Leigh M. Trevaskis's 2011 monograph, Holiness, Ethics and Ritual in Leviticus , is an outstanding contribution to the study of Leviticus. His main thesis is directed at the world of Old Testament scholarship, in which there is a consensus that the ritual laws of Leviticus 1-16 come from a school…
Richard Ounsworth begins his Joshua Typology in the New Testament with an excellent discussion of what he calls "ontological" typology, which he handily summarizes in four points. Typology involves "correspondences between real historical events, personalities, institutions, etc. described in scripture," a correspondence that is discerned (not created) by the reader…
Baylor University Press is sponsoring a reception to celebrate the official release of Peter Leithart's Gratitude: An Intellectual History . The reception will be held at the First Things offices in Manhattan on Thursday, March 6, at 6 PM. For more details, click here .
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Matthias Grebe’s Election, Atonement, and the Holy Spirit is an impressive piece of work. Grebe is as much at home in Barth and Barthian scholarship as in Leviticus and Old Testament scholarship, and the driving question of his book has to do with dogmatic logic that connects election and atonement…
John eats a book from an angel and is told to prophesy (Revelation 10:10-11). But the angel doesn’t commission him as prophet. Rather, “ they said, ‘You must prophesy’” (v. 11). Who are they? The nearest plural speakers are the thunders (10:3-4). It seems that the seven thunders commission John…
After reviewing Greek texts that describe the “strife of the elements,” Eduard Schweitzer summarizes the grim world of the ancients: He stresses “how widespread the conviction was that the four elements, though originally in a harmony of equilibrium, were continually threatening the existence of the world by their ‘mighty strife’…
Fernando Belo’s summary of the symbolic system of purity ( A Materialist Reading of the Gospel of Mark , 38-9) is a bit too schematic, but still illuminating. He sees two overlapping systems in the Pentateuch: one of pollution/contagion and one of debt. I focus on the first. Israel’s “symbolic…
Struggling to articulate the cosmic deliverance of Romans 8, Stanislas Breton ( A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul , 116-7) writes that “heaven and earth . . . are traversed by a visceral yearning orienting them toward and subordinating them to another kingdom, one that is more than human precisely…
The incomparable Martin Hengel begins The Atonement with a question: Did Greco-Roman culture have categories to understand Jesus’ death as an expiatory sacrifice? He answers with a dense Hengelian catalog of mythic and historical instances of the apotheosis of heroes, death for the fatherland, death for the truth, expelled pharmakoi…
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