Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
While controversies over the writings of Paul continue in various corners of the intellectual globe, the word of God given through Paul and his scribe and all of the church’s interpreters and translators over the last two millennia is still readily available to the lofty and the lowly. Paul, as…
The second in a series of studies in Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy 22:30: A man shall not take his father’s wife, and shall not uncover his father’s wing (Hebrew: kanaf ). There are a number of unusual features in this law that mark it out from the previous context, indicating that it…
The texts of Christianity have been slowly at work, under the power of the Holy Spirit for 2000 years now. If we could be magically transported back into the world of two millennia ago, modern Americans would be shocked at the cruelty of that world. There was no concern for…
The Story of the Gadarene Madman is told in all three synoptic Gospels (Matthew 8:28-34, Mark 5:1-20, Luke 8:26-37). Jesus ventures into a Gentile area when He passes over the Sea of Galilee. Upon disembarking from his boat, he is immediately met by a demon-possessed madman. Upon meeting Jesus, he…
Part 1 of a multi-part series of studies on Deuteronomy 22:30-23:8. Eric Auerbach, in his classic work on Western literature, devotes his first chapter to contrasting Homer with the Bible. Of Homer, he writes of the “need of Homeric style to leave nothing which it mentions half in darkness and…
Trinity House Fellow James B. Jordan will be a speaker at an International Conference on Biblical Symbolism that will be held in Seoul on Monday, May 27 in 2013. He will address "The Importance of Biblical Symbolism and Symbolic Interpretation of the Bible." The conference will have three other speakers…
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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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