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Writing

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

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Biblical Horizons

Gordon Wenham on Ritual

In a brief article entitled, “The Theology of Old Testament Sacrifice," Gordon Wenham, expanding on a comment about ritual from anthropologist Monica Wilson, states: We resort to ritual when we want to express our deepest feelings. Consider the rituals used in greeting people in our society: a nod, a handshake,…

by Peter LeithartJanuary 27, 1995
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Biblical Horizons

A Postscript to the Meyers Thesis

Everyone here in Cambridge is talking about sacrifice. My supervisor, Dr. John Milbank, is working on a book on gift in which he is dealing with recent literature on sacrifice. The graduate seminar in Systematics during Michaelmas Term focused on the theme of sacrifice. The first presenter was Dr. Ian…

by Peter LeithartJanuary 27, 1995
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Baptism

Sacramental Efficacy

Protestant-Catholic debates about the sacraments have usually taken the form of debates about sacramental efficacy. Protestants claim that Catholics believe that sacraments work ex opere operato , virtually a magical view of the sacraments. A priest goes through the motions and says the hocus-pocus and "presto!" the sacraments confer grace.…

by Peter LeithartJanuary 26, 1995
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Exodus

Mansions in the Sky, The Meaning of the Tabernacle

When Israel came out of Egypt, she was a collection of tribes descended from the Tribe of Abraham. Tribalism drops out of history into the "world" by looking back to ancestors and by orienting to the spirits that govern the world. The world must not be manipulated, because to do…

by James B. JordanJanuary 7, 1995
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Revelation

The Angels of Revelation

Angels are the mediators of the Old Creation, as Eugenio Corsini has rightly pointed out in his commentary, The Apocalypse. For this reason, argues Corsini, the book of Revelation must have to do with the final end of the Old Creation order, which he associates with the work of Jesus…

by James B. JordanJanuary 7, 1995
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Biblical Horizons

Triune Revelation and Through New Eyes Volume 2

Our procedure in "Through New Eyes Volume 2" thus far has been to lay out the general overview of history and its meaning as the Bible presents it. My hope is to fill this out in four major sections, corresponding to the four ages and the four testaments in the…

by James B. JordanJanuary 7, 1995

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Entrepreneurial State

Mariana Mazzucato argues in The Entrepreneurial State that government financing and research has been crucial to the technology booms of recent decades. Jeff Madrick summarizes part of her argument in his NYRB review : “private firms often invest after innovations have already come a long way under government’s much more…

April 9, 2014

Yahweh among the Gods

Shayne Cohen notes in his Beginnings of Jewishness that “many gentiles in antiquity recognized that the God of the Jews was a powerful God” (142). He cites the magical papyri that “routinely invoke the ‘God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,’ ‘Iao Sabaoth,’” as well as “a disciple of the orator…

April 9, 2014

Deuteronomy among the Greeks

In a 1978 article on funeral maledictions among Greeks, Louis Robert records a curse from an inscription. Various sources have been suggested, but Robert concludes that the malediction is a word for word translation of Deuteronomy 28:22, 28. He quotes one scholar’s conclusion that an inscription that quotes Deuteronomy alongside…

April 9, 2014

Jewish Sublime

“Longinus” describes the sublime as “the echo of a great soul” ( de Sublimitate , 9.2)). The sublime can be expressed in silence or in speech, and it can be found the terrible, awe-inspiring acts of the gods. But Longinus worries that Homeric accounts of the gods “if they be…

April 9, 2014
Shakespeare

Shakespeare the Christian?

The first of several of essays on Shakespeare is up at the Colson Center Worldview Journal this morning.

April 9, 2014

Pillar in the Temple

Jesus promises to make the overcomers in Philadelphia “pillars in the temple of My God” (Revelation 3:12). Yahweh was the original pillar. He led Israel to Sinai in a pillar of cloud, and then His cloudy pillar filled the tabernacle. Yahweh is the pillar in His own house, the load-bearing…

April 8, 2014

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