Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Genesis 3 ends on a decisive, and decisively negative, note. Yahweh “drove the man out” of the garden, and, in addition, “at the east of the garden of Eden He stationed the cherubim, and the flaming sword which turned every direction, to guard the way to the tree of life.”…
When she died in 2005 at the age of 72, Anna Haycraft, the author who published under the name Alice Thomas Ellis, was a celebrated writer in Great Britain. While working at Duckworth Publishers(which her husband owned), she produced a dozen novels, a collection of short stories, a cookbook, volumes…
Some have suggested recently that my "project" is postmodern. To clarify my views on postmodernism, I'm re-posting something I wrote in 2005, with a few modifications. For a fuller discussion, you can check out my Solomon among the Postmoderns (Canon, 2008). First, it is helpful to distinguish, as many writers…
Calling Jerusalem the "holy city" comes so naturally to Christians that it comes as something of a surprise to realize how infrequently the phrase is used in Scripture. Not only is Jerusalem rarely called holy, but in the Old Testament this classification is found only in texts that refer to…
Asking why the church doesn’t sing hymns or even why men don’t sing in church is a bit like lamenting over the lame man who can’t waltz on the dance floor. While it is a valid question, the more immediate question would seem to be, “why doesn’t the lame man…
The theme of 1 Timothy is the distinction between the true children in the Household of God and false children who really belong to the household of Satan. This is seen in the fact that in the chiastic structure of the Epistle, heresy is the subject in the center (…
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The crucial association in Paul’s reading of the Abraham story (Galatians 4) is the link between Hagar, Sinai, and slavery. It also seems to be the weakest link. Is it simply a geographic association? Could the association turn on a pun? Hagar is a “bondwoman,” paidiske in Greek (Galatians 4:22-23,…
When the fourth trumpet sounds, the sun, moon, and stars are plagued (Revelation 8:12). A third of the stars are darkened, and day and night ceases to “shine” for a third of the time (two four-hour periods of darkness). The fourth trumpet partially reverses the fourth day of creation, when…
In one of the many wonderful passages in his Christ’s Fulfillment of Torah and Temple , Matthew Levering points to the Abelardian dimensions of Thomas’s atonement theology: “for Aquinas, as for Abelard, the person who meditates upon Christ’s passion is able to ‘[know] thereby how much God loves him, and…
In response to a critique of Thomas Aquinas’s views on the law from Michael Wyschogrod, Matthew Levering argues ( Christ’s Fulfillment of Torah and Temple ) that “the Mosaic law . . . is still observed by Christians ” (his emphasis). Exactly right. And it gets better when Levering elaborates,…
We complain about speed a lot. Everything moves too fast to grasp or control. So we find ways to slow down - slow food stands against the McDonaldization of our diets. There’s even a World Institute for Slowness out there. But we don’t want everything to move slow, argues Lutz…
Martinus de Boer argues in his Galatians commentary that while “the expression ‘the works of the flesh’ . . . is reminiscent of the expression ‘works of the law,’” they are not equivalent. In fact, they aren’t grammatically parallel at all: “whereas the works of the law are the deeds…
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