Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
One of the major themes of the book of Acts is that Christ’s servants follow in His footsteps. For instance, if we compare the lives of Jesus and Paul, we find that each engaged in several years of travelling and preaching. Each set his face toward Jerusalem. In each case…
(This continues a discussion of the Biblical and Assyrian chronologies, begun in earlier posts. You can click on the category, "Biblical Chronology," to see the previous posts. Was Ahab at Qarqar? Allis writes: "According to his Monolith Inscription, Shalmaneser III, in his sixth year (854 B.C.) made an expedition to…
I am not infrequently asked for advice on how to implement the kinds of things I’ve discussed in Rite Reasons and in my book The Sociology of the Church. To that end I’m providing in this essay some nuts and bolts that grow out of more than ten years of…
The first commandment given in the Levitical sacrificial legislation has to do with the animals appropriate to sacrifice: "When any man of you brings an offering to the Lord, you shall bring your offering of cattle ( behemah ), from the herd or the flock" (Lev. 1:2). Cattle alone were…
In the first week of November, the voters of the state of Washington were asked to approve or disapprove physician-assisted suicide. This has led to a good deal of comment on the issue of euthanasia in the press, and provokes the following reflections. 1. From a social policy standpoint, the…
We come this month to one of the most pernicious problems in the reconstruction of Ancient Near Eastern chronology, the problem of the Assyrian King Lists. We cannot proceed further with our survey of the chronology of the kings of Israel until we remove this roadblock from our path. We…
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In John’s gospel, Jesus famously says “I am” again and again. These allude to the Old Testament’s revelation of “I am,” but if we can press the wording, they are also statements about the being of Jesus. Let’s say they are ontological statements. The predicate, though, describes Jesus’ ministry in…
There are some dreams and visions scattered around the Old Testament, but no book as the kind of concentration of dreams as Daniel. Kings dream, and the prophet dreams. In Esther too, the dream of Ahasuerus is the turning point of the story. Zechariah sees a series of visions in…
Salvian the Presbytery was not impressed with the post-Constantinian Roman empire. In his treatise on The Governance of God (translated in Writings of Salvian the Presbyter F ), he denounced the vices of the majority of believers: “The Church herself, which should be the appeaser of God in all things,…
The social vision of Paul’s “Pastoral Epistles” seems so very conservative, so Greco-Romany bourgeois. They seem far too conservative to be genuinely Pauline, according to the consensus view among critical scholars. That reading of the Pastorals is somewhat plausible if one skims the surface. Paul reinforces accepted male-female role distinctions,…
When we read Jonah, our attention is naturally focused on the fascinating character of the prophet. He disobeys and flees, only to be cast a watery grave. He learns his lesson enough to obey the next time, but he’s awfully surly at the end about the withered plant. Insofar as…
When Habakkuk complains that the Lord isn’t doing anything about the violence and flouting of the law in Israel, Yahweh responds by telling the prophet the Chaldeans are coming. That’s not much of an answer, but there’s a hint that the Chaldean forces are from Yahweh: In verse 1:8, the…
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