Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Higher critics have, for a long time, posited a Second Isaiah to account for the structural and tone differences in the book from chapter 40 on. Now, we do believe in a Second Isaiah, but believe that the form critics have generally suffered from a lack of imagination both in…
A couple of the most serious mistranslations in our Bibles are found in the book of Leviticus. The main reason these errors have gone unreformed, I believe, is because Leviticus is simply not studied often enough, so the problem has never been fully addressed. The first mistranslation is found right…
Thomas Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , is really a parenthesis inside of the larger reality of Christian history. Progress and forward movement inside of science is a footnote to the larger and more general reality of covenant renewals in both Biblical and Christian history. The fundamental mark…
James Jordan, in the June/July 1995 Biblical Horizons, wrote a very helpful essay, "The Great Hangover," the gist of which I entirely agree with. The theme of the essay was that the Church to move forward must shuck off the old husks of Hellenism, Rabbinism, and undo admiration for all…
Traditionally, the three offices in the Presbyterian churches have been teaching elder, ruling elder, and deacon. These have been associated with priest, elder, and Levite respectively. We have seen that the deacon is in fact an apprentice and assistance elder. We have also seen that Levites as well as priests…
John 7:39 interprets Jesus’ offer of living water as an offer of the Spirit to those who believe, "for," John continues, "the Spirit was not yet, because Jesus was not yet glorified." John was not making an ontological statement about the Spirit, as if the Spirit did not exist until…
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Judaism and Christianity are often contrasted as an opposition between “ritualistic” and “nonritualistic” systems. Howard Eilberg-Schwartz ( The Savage in Judaism , 140) argues that this is a mistake. The real difference is a difference of “root metaphor.” This is partly a difference between the pastoral/agricultural setting of Israel’s imaginative…
Tercio Bretanha Junker’s Prophetic Liturgy has much to commend it. Junker aims to show how the church is trained for “prophetic praxis” through the liturgy. Liturgy “should facilitate the community’s awareness of its biblical foundations, the Christian historical trajectory, a consciousness of its cultural unity, and attentiveness to the transformative…
Stepan Trofimovich, the vain Francophone liberal in Dostoevsky’s Demons , claims to know the gospels well from reading Renan, but in fact hasn’t read the Bible itself in a long time. During an illness, he comes to see himself as the liar he is and asks Sophia to read the…
Jesus comes like a thief to the unsuspecting, the sleepy (Revelation 3:3). That doesn’t simply mean that His coming is a surprise. It means that He comes to take. That’s what thieves do. To prevent this, the angel of the church at Sardis has to “keep” ( tereo ) or…
George Pattison’s closing essay in Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition explores the similarities between Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky. It’s been common to read both as “prophets revealing to `modern man’ the abyssal freedom, the wild frontiers and the midnight cries that threaten both the rational system-building of philosophers and social engineers…
In her contribution to Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition , Diane Thompson offers a brilliant analysis of Marmeladov’s speech to Raskolnikov at the beginning of Crime and Punishment . Everything he says is seasoned with grandiloquent references to the gospels, and especially to the Passion and last judgment narratives. He…
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