Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Every attempt to understand the Christian sacraments makes use of comparisons or analogies with other rituals, events, or customs. Calvin and those who followed him, for example, spoke of the sacraments as “seals,” and compared them to the “seal of approval” that an official impresses on a document. Thinking about…
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy has pointed out in his essay "Hitler and Israel, or On Prayer" (available for $2.00 from Biblical Horizons ) that it is God’s word "No!" that establishes in a culture the distinction between the Creator and the creature. The Bible repeatedly says "No!" to every human attempt to…
If you missed Gattaca at the movie theaters, you can probably check it out from your local video store now. And you should. This is one of those relatively rare thought-provoking movies that can stand being watched with brain in gear more than once. It is also poetic, sensitive, visually…
Part 4: The Nephilim Factor Western Civilization partakes of what I call "the Nephilim Factor." The Enoch Factor means that the pagans get there first. This is both a blessing and a danger. As a blessing, it means that they work out techniques of dominion over the lower creation that…
The Worship Service Then the one speaking with me took me by the hair and lifted me into the air in the middle of the great room. And as I watched, I saw people entering the room to the sound of the great bells outside. Then entered from all four…
Part 3: Philosophy (continued) If we realize that human beings are the images of God, and that man hates God, then we realize that all non-Christian political philosophy is founded on a fundamental hatred of other human beings, a hatred manifest in contempt. Rome, like Enoch, was founded on the…
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Traditional debates about faith and works might be clarified and illuminated by highlighting eschatology. To wit: God intends to establish perfect justice and peace, reconciling all things by the Spirit in the Son. That is the future of the world. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence…
As Jacob re-enters the land after his sojourn in Haran, he sends ahead a present ( minchah ) to appease ( kafar ) his estranged brother Esau (Genesis 32:20-21). This is a “peace offering,” and not only in a metaphorical sense. The text uses the language of sacrifice, and other…
God is, Edwards says, “self-existent from all eternity, absolutely perfect in himself, in possession of infinite and independent good . . . above all need and all capacity of being added to and advanced, made better and happier in any respect.” Edwards also says things like this: “That nature in…
Stephen Stein doesn’t much like what he calls Jonathan Edwards’s “strange and troubling” interpretation of Esther (an essay in Jonathan Edwards at 300: Essays on the Tercentenary of His Birth ). Edwards linked Esther with the account of the Amelikes in Exodus 17, and used the “curse of perpetual war…
What is an American? Twenty years ago, Garry Wills ( John Wayne’s America ) answered that the “archetypal American is a displaced person – arrived from a rejected past, breaking into a glorious future, on the move, fearless himself, feared by others, a killed cleansing the world of things that…
The biblical writers don’t know how to end a story. Genesis 22, one of the best-known and most dramatic of biblical texts, the story of Abraham’s interrupted sacrifice of Isaac, is a case in point. Give the episode to a Hollywood script writer and the thing would end with a…
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