Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In the first installment of this essay, I offered the following chiastic outline of 1 Timothy: A. 1:1-2. Paul greets Timothy as a true child of the Faith, and blesses with grace, mercy, and peace. B. 1:3-7. Timothy is urged to command against heresy. C. 1:8-11. The reason the Law…
In the first installment of this essay, I offered the following chiastic outline of 1 Timothy: A. 1:1-2. Paul greets Timothy as a true child of the Faith, and blesses with grace, mercy, and peace. B. 1:3-7. Timothy is urged to command against heresy. C. 1:8-11. The reason the Law…
In the Bible, a memorial is something that brings God's promises and previous actions to mind, so that He can do them again. The rainbow is the model, set in heaven so that Yahweh remembers the covenant He makes with Noah (Genesis 9:13-15). God is light and dwells in a…
The First Epistle to Timothy fits neatly in the context of what King Jesus and the church are doing in the gospels, in Acts, Revelation, and all of the Apostolic Age in between. Paul writes to Timothy to encourage him in his work as a pastor in the “latter days,”…
I have been pastoring Cornerstone Reformed Church in Carbondale, Illinois since 1999. We are members of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), but have been practicing catholicity for many years, both personally and corporately. I’ve always believed that the Church of Jesus Christ is much more than the local…
Ecumenism is easy to talk about. It’s doing something to promote it that’s the problem. As a pastor in a town with churches of different denominations, all of whom love their doctrinal distinctions and are jealous to defend them whenever they perceive the slightest challenge, how can you be ecumenical…
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Isaiah 49 is reassurance to Zion that Yahweh has not forgotten her. Her walls are continuously ( tamid ) before Yahweh, like the sacrifices and showbread (v. 16). And Yahweh goes beyond the assurance of His concern to promise that Zion will be surrounded by gathered people, returned exiles and…
The Hebrew of Isaiah 49:17 is beautifully symmetrical. Transliterated, it reads: miharu banayik meharsayik umacharivayik mimmek yetze’u . The endings of the six words form a neat pattern: one - u followed by four words ending with the second person singular pronomial suffix ( k ), and then another -…
The Hebrew word beten frequently means “womb” (Genesis 25:23; Number 5:22; Psalm 22:9-10; 71:6; Jeremiah 1:5). In a few instances, though, the word is used in unusual contexts. When Yahweh offers Ezekiel a scroll to eat, He orders him to eat it with his beten and to fill his “bowels”…
God has no needs. Philo, Seneca, and classic Christian theology agree on that. But I think the explanation differs. Seneca ( On Benefits (The Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca) , bk. 4) explains that “God bestows upon us very many and very great benefits, with no thought of any…
The Christian conviction that Jesus had defeated the powers and brought an end to old rites had major effects on early Christian social engagement, Gary Ferngren implies in his 2009 Medicine and Health Care in Early Christianity . “Before the advent of Christianity,” he says, “there was no concept of…
For all its reputation for iconoclasm, modernism, says Robert Alter in Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture (The Franz Rosenzweig Lecture Series) , is more accurately described as a “paradoxical amalgam of iconoclasm and hypertraditionalism” (p. 8). Alter’s book explores this phenomenon, along with the “double…
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