Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Bruce Marshall once wrote that every young man who rings the bell at a brothel is unconsciously looking for God. While it is not necessarily true that the inward desire of every man is ultimately a thirst for righteousness, it is true that every sin is the disordering of a…
In a previous essay , I argued that the story which begins with Lot and culminates in Ruth’s great-grandson David follows God’s five-fold pattern of creative work as laid out by Jim Jordan: taking something in hand (in this case, the Abrahamic family), restructuring it, distributing the product of labor,…
Gilder, George. Men and Marriage. Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2023. 1 By 1973, the hightide of second-wave feminism had flooded the beaches of American culture. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique eroded the shores of traditional female roles by naming and stirring up further domestic discontentment. Kate Millet wrote her dissertation-turned-book,…
The Book of Job is a very tortuous book. The arguments of Job and his friends are shot through with truth and error hopelessly mixed together. Every line of contentious poetry stands locked in deadly battle with every other line. As maddening as this can be for a reader who…
More than once in the last 50 years it has occurred to me that Paul might have known Jesus before He appeared to Paul on the Damascus road, but I had never taken up the notion in earnest until recently when I ran into a book by Stanley Porter titled…
The question in the title is genuine, not polemic. I could be perfectly happy to follow an ancient — and what is regarded as a well-attested — tradition. But I do not feel compelled to follow it simply because it is tradition. I would like to have arguments that Peter…
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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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