When the seven bowl angels appear, the heavenly temple is filled with the smoke of God’s glory (Revelation 15:5-8). This links with the consecration of the tabernacle in Exodus 40 and of the temple in 1 Kings 8. In both cases, the glory of the lord fills the house so that no one can enter. In Revelation, it is the heavenly temple. That temple has been the sanctuary for the angels, the beasts, and the twenty-four Ancient Ones. But that... Read more
Mark Chaves observes (Congregations in America) that it is difficult to say what congregations do, and that for two reasons. On the one hand, a congregation’s “ministry” may actually be the work of a tiny minority of a congregation., On the other hand, congregations in the US are widely and deeply involved in many activities and programs that aren’t organized by the congregation itself. He endorses Paul Douglass, who said in 1927 that a congregation is “a network of enterprises... Read more
Matthew Bates argues in The Birth of the Trinity that Trinitarian theology emerged from prosopological reading of the Old Testament. This isn’t the same as typology. In a typological reading, David, say, is “regarded . . . as a type or pattern for the future Christ, while at the same time, because the king embodied Israel’s national sorrows and hopes he was also a type in the sense of a corporate symbol, allowing early Christians to see an imitative correspondence between... Read more
In his Christians at the Borders, Guatemalan-American theologian M. Daniel Carroll addresses Samuel Huntington’s claim that the newest American immigrants are not assimilating to American values and priorities. Carroll agrees that immigrants have a responsibility to assimilate to the host country, and provides a biblical argument in support. He reviews the many Old Testament passages that demand kindness and justice for strangers, and then adds “the Old Testament law makes clear that there are expectations for the sojourner, just as there... Read more
In an essay on “The Obvious” (published in The Dialectics of Liberation), R. D. Laing reflects on the “very low” visibility of social events: “In social space one’s direct immediate capacity to see what is happening does not extend any further than one’s own senses extend. Beyond that one has to make inferences, based on hearsay evidence, reports of one kind or another of what other human beings are able to see within their equally limited field of observation. As in... Read more
The word “bowl” (Greek, phiale) is used twelve times in Revelation, almost all of them in chapters 15-16. The other main use comes in chapter 5, where the angelic choir is equipped with bowls of incense following the appearance of the Lamb in heaven. In chapter 15, the bowls are filled with the wine-blood of God’s wrath. These two uses of bowls are inverses of one another. In chapter 5, the bowls are upright, and smoke rises from them before... Read more
During the latter part of the nineteenth century, writes Vanessa Ogle (The Global Transformation of Time), “saw dramatically enhanced interactions on a global scale, drawing people and regions into networks of production and exchange, into imperial and colonial careers and livelihoods, while disrupting autonomous, regional economic and political systems in non-Western societies. . . . The nineteenth-century world, to use a present-day term, was rapidly becoming more globalized” (3). The global homogenization of time-keeping was a sign and facilitator of... Read more
Ron Highland argues (The Faithful Creator) that discussions of providence and freedom often get off on the wrong foot because of a faulty definition of freedom. “Many recent discussions of freedom give the impression that the Bible speaks directly and often about a freedom of the will given with our creation and shared by every human being” (277). That is not so. For the Bible, he argues, freedom and salvation are closely linked, so that “freedom in the fullest sense... Read more
Ron Highland’s The Faithful Creator is “sustained argument with evangelical open theism, liberal process theism and other models of creation and providence that deny that God accomplishes his good will in all things.” All such paradigms, he argues, fail ‘to take God’s transcendence seriously enough, thinking that God cannot relate to creation unless God possesses certain properties, powers and activities in common with creatures.” These positions view “God and creation as inhabiting the same causal space, so that where God is... Read more
In the introduction to his recent Prophetic Lament, Soong-Chan Rah summarizes studies that show that “lament is often missing from the narrative of the American church” (21). One study “found that in the Lutheran Book of Worship, the Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer, the Catholic Lectionary for Mass, the Hymnal of the United Church of Christ, and the United Methodist Hymnal, ‘the majority of Psalms omitted from liturgical use are the laments.’” Another study pointed out that “lament constitutes 40 percent... Read more
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