The first two chapters of 2 Kings match in many ways. In both, Elijah is seen ?going up?E?Efirst to the top of a hill, and then to heaven. In both passages, things happen in threes ?Ethe oracle of Elijah is delivered three times and three sets of fifty men appear in chapter 1, and in chapter 2 Elijah tells Elisha three times to stay behind and three times he refuses. In chapter 1, Ahaziah sends fifty men to search for... Read more
ROMANS 9:14-18 Paul rejects the idea that there is injustice with God, as he did in equally vigorous terms in chapter 3, where God?s righteousness is closely linked with His faithfulness (v. 3) and His truth (v. 7). And he supports this conclusion with a quotation from Exodus 33. A. Katherine Grieb has offered an insightful discussion of this quotation. She points out that this is a quotation from Moses?Eintercession with God on Sinai following the golden calf incident. Moses... Read more
Wright points out that the storyline Paul is reviewing in Romans 9 is not a general storyline for any old nation or race, nor the history of individuals, but specifically the story of Israel. Whatever God does with other nations, Paul is showing that God?s plan with Israel always involved a division within the family of Israel. Wright, however, is protesting too much, attempting to avoid as he does elsewhere in his exposition the predestinarian implications of Romans 9. It... Read more
John Bergsma and Scott Hahn offer a compelling defense of a “maternal incest” view of the story of Noah’s nakedness in Genesis 9 (JBL 124:1). They reject a “voyeurist” interpretation of the story. They find more to recommend a “paternal incest” view of the story, pointing to the parallels between Gen 9 and Gen 19 (incest of Lot and daughters); the sexual connotations of “uncover” and “nakedness” elsewhere in the OT; the sexual associations of wine and vineyard (including in... Read more
John Bergsma and Scott Hahn offer a compelling defense of a “maternal incest” view of the story of Noah’s nakedness in Genesis 9 (JBL 124:1). They reject a “voyeurist” interpretation of the story. They find more to recommend a “paternal incest” view of the story, pointing to the parallels between Gen 9 and Gen 19 (incest of Lot and daughters); the sexual connotations of “uncover” and “nakedness” elsewhere in the OT; the sexual associations of wine and vineyard (including in... Read more
George Gilder suggests in Telecosm that economists study scarcity rather than abundance because the former is measurable, and the latter approaches infinity (and hence zero price): “The economists’ focus on scarcity stems from the fact that shortages are measurable and end at zero. They constrain an economic model to produce a clearly calculable result, an identifiable choke point in the industrial circuitry. Abundances are incalculable and have no obvious cap. They tend to end in a near zero price and... Read more
In his 2001 book, Darwin’s God , Cornelius Hunter argues that the theory of evolution was less a solution to a scientific problem than a solution to a moral, theological, and religious problem: the problem of evil. How could one rationally hold to the existence of a good God in the face of the natural evil of the creation? Lacking (due to movements within theology itself) traditional categories such as God’s wrath or the notion of God’s judgment, Darwin’s answer... Read more
Is the Trinity a solution to the “problem of the one and many”? I think not. It is less a solution than a subversion of the problem itself. In Trinitarian theology, “one” no longer means what “one” means in the traditional problem of the one and many. If it does mean the same thing, then we’re lurching headlong to quaternity or modalism rather than Trinity. There is no undifferentiated one in the Trinity, no unsupplemented origin, for the one God... Read more
Rhetorically, many of the recent attacks on “classical theism” gain a foothold by characterizing classical theism as presenting a Hellenistic, static, and immobile God very much at odds with the dynamic, very Live God of Scripture. It is time to challenge this rhetorical move, and reverse this charge. Those who attack classical theism are the ones with a static and immobile God. For classical theism, God is “pure act” and this describes, as David Hart says, a dynamism “endlessly more... Read more
Gregg Easterbrook, a regular source of counter-intuitive insight, summarizes recent studies that show a decade-long decline in war around the world (TNR, May 30): “Five years ago, two academics – Monty Marshall, research director at the Center for Global Policy at George Mason University, and Ted Robert Gurr, a professor of government at the University of Maryland – spent months compiling all available data on the frequency and death toll of twentieth-century combat, expecting to find an ever-worsening ledger of... Read more
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