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Writing

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

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Art

The Second Word IV: Implications

What About Catholics? (continued) Usually, such people are not seeking graven images, but rather their idolatry is of a broader character. They are seeking a home on earth. Scott Hahn’s book is called Rome Sweet Home . This is the essential sin, for there is no home on earth. The…

by James B. JordanDecember 7, 1994
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Biblical Studies

The Gospel and the Virtues

Reading the earliest Christian apologists is like watching a movie in which the hero has the means to demolish his opponents in his grasp but never realizes it. The apologists come across as men not altogether aware of the radical character of the gospel they defend. In response to charges…

by Peter LeithartNovember 23, 1994
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Biblical Studies

Suffer the Little Children

Then [Elisha] went up from there to Bethel; and as he was going up by the way, ne`arim came out from the city and mocked him and said to him, "Go up, you baldhead; go up, you baldhead!" When he looked behind him and saw them, he cursed them in…

by Peter LeithartNovember 23, 1994
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Biblical Chronology

Genesis 5 & 11: Chronological-Theological Reflections (Part 2)

Further Numerical Items of Interest Umberto Cassuto points out some other numerical factors in Genesis 5. 1 For one thing, he observes that every number in Genesis 5 is a multiple of 5, sometimes with the addition of 7. We have, in essence, made this point already. He also points…

by James B. JordanNovember 7, 1994
Biblical Horizons

The Second Word III: Exposition; Implications

Prostration God has designed the human body in a marvelous way, and Biblical religion is very physical. We believe in the resurrection of the body, against all pagan ideas of the immortality of the soul. We bury our bodies, not burning them. Human beings in their totality, including our bodies,…

by James B. JordanOctober 7, 1994
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Revelation

The Last Eight Visions of Revelation

Since Revelation is laid out in serieses of sevens, it is worth investigating to see if there is a series of seven after the seven libation-bowls of chapter 16. I believe there is, and it is the burden of this essay to expose it. The series of sevens, or heptamerous…

by James B. JordanOctober 7, 1994

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Dostoevsky the Liberal?

So, this is a moment of dialog with myself. I have been musing on Bakhtin and Dostoevsky, so the self-division seems appropriate. I have charged that Dostoevsky’s Christ is an ineffectual liberal Christ, using The Idiot as exhibit #1. But Diane Thompson’s essay on the biblical word in Dostoevsky’s poetics…

March 26, 2014

A Cheer for Bishop Berkeley

Milbank suggests that Berkeley makes some important breakthroughs in working out a Christian understanding of language and of a creation made by the Logos (“Theological Without Substance,” Journal of Literature and Theology 2:2 [1988]). Berkeley imagines a metaphysics without substance, but, because he believes in a God who communicates in…

March 26, 2014

Not Boiled

In his famed “culinary triangle” (see Food and Culture: A Reader ) Claude Levi-Strauss suggested a triple classification of food: raw, cooked, and rotten. Raw is the natural state; cooked is a cultural transformation of nature, and rotten is a natural transformation. Those formed the corners of a triangle. Along…

March 26, 2014

God Gone Silent

I offer a meditation on Jesus’ entry into the silence of the grave at the Trinity House site. Click here .

March 26, 2014

Depths of Satan

Jezebel and her children are ostensibly the ones who are obsessed with the “deep things ( bathea ) of Satan” (Revelation 3:24). That fits into the letter to Thyatira in various ways. For starters, Jehu accused Jezebel of being involved in sorcery (2 Kings 9:22), and the church’s counterpart to…

March 25, 2014

The End of Entertainment?

David Thomson (at TNR ) thinks that Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death, and his legacy of acting, raises some fundamental questions about what we take as entertainment these days: “No movie actor has risked so much on despondency. This is not to say that every film star has been single-mindedly happy:…

March 25, 2014

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