Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
This year’s Biblical Horizons conference was another great success and we would like to thank all those who were involved by helping out with the catering or opening up their homes to attendees and speakers. The talks, open-ended as they were, offered a fresh perspective and food for thought on…
I find myself often rehearsing conversations with my children. When the house is quiet in the late evening, and I'm standing in front of a pile of soapy dishes, I think about what I am going to say to them in certain situations. When I am driving in the car,…
In Matthew 24:29 , Jesus employs “cosmic language,” signs in the sun, moon and stars, to predict the imminent end of the Old Covenant. His first-century audience would have recognized His allusion to the prophecy against Babylon in Isaiah 13 and understood His discourse as a condemnation of Jerusalem as…
The Enthroned One speaks to John (Revelation 21:6): “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give to the one who thirsts from the spring of the water of life without cost.” It's a little theology proper. For starters, there's the Greek version of…
In reading about how we got into this mess, I came across a very interesting couple of paragraphs that I think the church could learn from if we are going to counter the Obergefell ruling. Prior to 2009, same sex “marriage” had gone to the ballot box thirty-one times in…
In my previous essay on Macbeth , I pointed out that Shakespeare rewrote Scottish history to construct a play which points to Adam’s Fall — a man and a woman tempted by devils to steal the throne and become like gods. It is hard to imagine anyone in Shakespeare’s day…
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When Israel’s light shines, kings will flock to Zion to “serve” ( sharat ) Israel. The word typically describes priestly ministry. In the Pentateuch “stand to serve” is a thumbnail description of priestly ministry (Numbers 16:9; Deuteronomy 10:8; 17:12; 18:5, 7), and sharat also describes priestly ministry in the post-exilic…
Irene Backus began her study of Reformation Readings of the Apocalypse: Geneva, Zurich, and Wittenberg out of frustration that Protestant commentaries on Revelation were widely unavailable. Her book is a straightforward summation of the ways Calvinists and Lutherans read the book. Those in Calvin’s circle were, she concludes, “conservative” in…
When Jesus called the disciples to be “fishers of men,” he was riffing on imagery from the prophets. Yahweh fishes for Israel as He gathers exiled Jews from the sea of nations in His nets. Isaiah 60:5 gives an additional angle on the imagery. In the parallel lines at the…
Yahweh bares His arm so that the nations can see the “salvation of our God” (Isaiah 52:10; Heb. yeshu’at-elohenu ). The genitive seems obviously to refer to the salvation that God brings. After all, what sense would it make to speak of God Himself being saved? But then Isaiah twice…
Zizek ( The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? ) consider’s John Caputo’s On Religion to be the “ultimate formulation of Derridean deconstructive messianism” (256). Caputo reveals that deconstruction is a “Jewish science” at war with idols and even, Caputo says, with incarnations “because incarnations are always local occurrences” (quoted…
“Who are these who fly like a cloud, and like the doves to their windows?” someone asks in Isaiah 60:8. It’s a puzzling question in a context having to do with the assembling of Gentiles at Zion for worship (vv. 6-7, note gold, frankincense, flocks and rams that ascend on…
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