Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
A Study in Biblical and Practical Theology Sunday School Notes / Epiphany 2004 Introductory Note: January 6 is Epiphany in the traditional church calendar. Though Epiphany is often treated as a single day, with the Sundays following counted as “Sundays after Epiphany,” we will treat Epiphany as an extended season.…
Imagine someone from another world trying to learn to live in our society according to our customs. What if someone gave him a check for a hundred dollars for his birthday–the first check he had ever seen in his life? Would he immediately understand how a check was used? Perhaps…
According to Presbyterian doctrine, as articulated in the Westminster Confession of Faith, baptism is a baptized person’s “admission… into the visible church.” By referring to the “visible church,” the document makes clear it is referring to the present institutional Church with all her imperfections, as opposed to the future Church…
N. T. Wright claims that in the Apostle Paul’s writings “righteousness,” as it predicated of humans, denotes “covenant membership.” When he wrote this in the New Bible Dictionary edited by Sinclair Ferguson, J. I. Packer, and David Wright, no one thought this was too big a deal. However, when he…
It seems almost human nature to think that we can find something to do for God that will make Him do us favors. If we live more virtuously, or cut down on a vice or two, then God will have to reward us. But the problem with this notion is…
The First Commandment teaches us to trust in Christ alone for justification, sanctification, and eternal life. The First Commandment reads (I’m using NASB throughout): “You shall have no other gods before Me.” Obviously, trusting in someone or something else (even one’s own good works) for justification, sanctification, and eternal life”…
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Beard envy is rampant, Serena Solomon reports , and some men are taking action: “The thick, flowing beards adorning hipsters from Williamsburg to Park Slope are driving follicly-challenged New Yorkers to a little-known but growing field of plastic surgery - facial hair transplants. Whether they’re filling in a few gaps…
FJA Hort offered a concise summary of the argument against dating Revelation in the reign of Domitian and for a Neronian date in his 1908 study of The Apocalypse of St John I-III . First, the negative case rests on a sense of the limits of the persecution of Domitian:…
“What do all these typographical high jinks signify?” asks Paul Muldoon about e. e. cummings’s poem about Buffalo Bill in a New Yorker review of Susan Cheever’s E. E. Cummings: A Life . Muldoon suggests several answers: “Perhaps the disregard for punctuation allows the reader a more active role in…
Marshall Poe notes in his TLS review that Catherine Merridale’s Red Fortress challenges the traditional statist interpretation of Russian history: “According to her, weak Russian leaders and their cronies concocted the statist theory - in various guises, at various times - simply to justify the consolidation and enhancement of their…
Jonathan Klawans charges ( Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple ) that Girard’s Violence and the Sacred is “nothing short of an indictment of sacrificial rituals” (22), which Girard finds “abhorrent” (23). Klawans thinks that Girard’s theory suffers from the same flaws as earlier theories from Robertson Smith and James Frazer.…
When the Philistines capture the ark, they think Dagon has defeated Yahweh. Yet Yahweh is a power worth deploying as a subordinate to Dagon, so that put the ark in Dagon’s temple (1 Samuel 5). Dagon apparently knows that he’s in the presence of the High God. Every morning, He…
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