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Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.

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Apostle Paul

Jonah’s Pauline Move: Finding Mercy for Gentiles in Texts about Mercy for Israel

Jonah is Paul’s typological opposite. Indeed, in the whole Old Testament, it would be difficult to find a more perfect foil to Paul than Jonah. Whereas Paul crosses the sea to enact God’s saving purposes for the Gentiles, Jonah crosses the sea to avoid bringing Gentiles God’s mercy. For that…

by Josh JensenJanuary 11, 2024
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Family

A House for Me

Years ago, I realized that if my children wanted to feel like their house was a home, I needed to be intentional about making our physical shelter a place of spiritual refuge. I began to see the Holy Spirit as the indwelling person of the Trinity—the one who makes His…

by Mandi GerthJanuary 9, 2024
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Charity

On Parrhesia and Gospel Witness

When the crowds encircle Christ in Solomon’s Porch during the Festival of Dedication, they charge him: “tell us boldly who you are!” 1 They do not draw-up to him to with excited anticipation as they did earlier in the Gospel, 2 instead they flank him like a gang of wolves.…

by Mark BriansJanuary 4, 2024
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Deuteronomy

Misunderstanding Moses

1 In Deuteronomy 7:1-5, Moses wrote: When Yahweh your God brings you into the land which you go to possess, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations…

by Ralph Allan SmithJanuary 3, 2024
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Advent

40 Theses on Christmas

Every Advent witnesses the gruesome reanimation of the voice that whispers “you know , Christmas is just a pagan holiday…” with that sort of conversational ellipsis that does not so much invite further reflection but halts and forecloses it. The claims are several and equally spurious: Jesus wasn’t born on…

by Mark BriansDecember 26, 2023
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Genesis

The Twelve Trials of Abraham

Abraham's life in Genesis is a series of trials. He travels hundreds of miles from his family into a new land, flees from a famine into the hands of a king who takes his wife, and after returning, has to rescue his brother from a war. He's involved with two…

by Donald LinnemeyerDecember 26, 2023

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Reagan Unbound

Ken Adelman had an inside track for understanding Reagan at Reykjavik , the apparently failed but ultimately epoch-making negotiations about nuclear arms between Reagan and Gorbachev in Iceland. According to the NYTBR review, Reagan “spooked Republican foreign policy hands with lofty talk of ‘the total elimination one day of nuclear…

August 7, 2014
Theology

Singular God

Walter Lowe’s contribution to the Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology is a brief not for particularity but for the postmodern recovery of singularity after the collapse of Enlightenment universalism. Lowe argues, “Nothing dictates that truth, elusive as it is, cannot possibly be revealed in, and linked to, a speci?c singularity;…

August 7, 2014

Moses, Creator

Exodus includes two descriptions of the furnishings of the tabernacle, one before the golden calf incident (25-31) and one after (35-40). Exodus 39:32-43 provides the conclusion to a section describing the construction of the tabernacle and furnishings, which is followed by the actual erection of the tabernacle in chapter 40.…

August 7, 2014

Great Sword

When the second creature calls out, a red horse emerges from the opened heaven, with a rider who receives the ability to remove peace, to set men against each other, using a “great sword” ( machaira megale , Revelation 6:4). Only a few “great swords” appear elsewhere in Scripture. Yahweh…

August 7, 2014

Divine Energies

In an appendix to Fullness Received and Returned (390), Seng-Kong Tan summarizes Paul Negrut’s arguments against the notion of divine energies developed by Gregory of Palamas. First, “while the energies are enhypostatic and only express but are not identical to the divine persons, it follows that ‘the latter is forced…

August 7, 2014

For Office Windows

Everyone knows, as Eric Jaffe puts it , that “Outside views are often badges of seniority or achievement in the work world—understandably, given that they’re in short supply.” A new study suggests that there’s more at stake, though: “an interdisciplinary team of architects and medical researchers . . . recently…

August 7, 2014

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