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You’ve probably been to church in the past 10 years and not liked some of the music but not exactly sure why. In this video we are going to look at the 10 problems with contemporary worship music.

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<p>Little known fact, Samson was a good guy:</p>...

Men and women are similar and different and they’re similar and different in all facets of their life. Men and women have different physical excellencies and one of the main physical excellencies of men is strength and women is beauty.

Pano Kanelos announced on Barry Weiss’ Substack that they were helping cofound the University in Austin that would be devoted to “truth” and “freedom.” There are good and bad things about this so let’s look at both.

For years I have collected audio resources and lecture courses. Partly because I have reading difficulty and partly because I can listen to audio in many more places than I can read. There are phenomenal audio lectures available for learning the history of philosophy so in no particular order, here they are.

Welcome back to the Bible is Art where we explore the literary artistry of the Bible and this week we’re looking at the strange last sentence of John’s Gospel.

If I were to film this video without being in it what would you think? [static/glitch transition yourself in] You might think that there’s something wrong, that it was a mistake but for great works of art that option is not available because the artist has thought way more than you.

Classic fairy tales are told and retold, rewritten and dramatized innumerable times. But when you go back to the originals you often find fascinating and perplexing mysteries that have been buried in the retellings. Today we’re going to look at Beauty and the Beast.

Babette’s Feast is a sophisticated analysis of the relationship between sensuous and spiritual beauty written by Karen Blixen and then made into an oscar winning film. Unfortunately, some of the sophistication was missed in the film so we will jump between the two in order to uncover its beauty.

Galatians 3:1 - “O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched (baskanen) you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified.”

For something to be beautiful and well designed it must have form or more precisely multiple forms. And a form is something with a structure or nature or essence, a meaningful and intelligible structure.

One of the common reasons given is that the Hebrew form means Yah(weh) is Salvation. And while that’s certainly true, whenever you name someone a famous person’s named there’s always more going on than simply the etymology.

How the healing of the centurion’s servant is told as a battle.

Hierarchy is one of the most important aesthetic principles but it is today the most forgotten. And hierarchy is not just a principal in aesthetics but a principle in all of reality.

Some thoughts on the Hennessy bottle designed by the architect Frank Gehry. And symmetry. And Russell Kirk.

Here is a summary of my previous posts on why Jesus was resurrected on my third day:

Trump, Debate & Theology of Laughter

A look at some overlooked questions about political signs.

This literary structure/outline comes from Robert B. Chisholm Jr. in Handbook on the Prophets:

The two most compelling structures proposed for Leviticus come from Christopher R. Smith and Moshe Kline.

Here is the literary structure or outline of the Pentateuch.

Unity and diversity are the most fundamental aesthetic properties. That is, for a work to be beautiful or well designed it must have both unity and diversity

The scene is narrated as a battle or a reverse battle, or a battle against death. Notice, Luke narrates this story with words and concepts from war.

This might seem like a strange text. Why talk about the chief priests buying a field with money from betraying Jesus? But this is the last of 12 fulfillment sayings in Matthew where something will happen and then Matthew will say that this fulfills something from the Old Testament and then he’ll quote it.

"Iago" (from Shakespeare's Othello) comes from Welsh and Galician and means "Jacob." This makes sense given that Jacob deceives his brother just like Iago deceives Othello. But there might be another meaning.

In the book The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, Meir Sternberg has a chapter on gaps in stories. He says that

Head A His head and hair were white as white wool, white as snow; Face B his eyes were like a flame of fire,

It is commonly observed that Revelation is cyclical, covering the same period (normally from Christ's 1st to 2nd coming) from different perspectives.

Why is the voice behind John? The book of Revelation is about revealing, unveiling what we do not see but is there. This dramatic action embodies that principle.

The story of Zacchaeus is one of the most well known stories in the gospels. But when you read it there is a strange information distribution. Now, what’s information distribution? One of the helpful things that you can do when you’re trying to understand a story, especially a well-known one, is look at how much information is devoted to each major section or event or character in the story.

<h2>How Many Chapters in the Bible?</h2><p>1,189 chapters.</p><h2>How Many Books in the Bible?</h2><p>There are 66 books in the Bible.</p><h2>How Many...

Welcome back to the Bible is Art where we are currently in a series on a Christian Guide to Beauty and Design. If you haven’t seen the videos up to now I would recommend you watch those before you watch this. But if you’re ready to move on, today, we’re talking about the properties of, or, what makes something beautiful.

<p>twice translated once at beginning and once at end in each case you have a translated ontology (immanuel - God to man, lema lema sabachthani - deat...

The story is fairly straightforward, but the extended descriptions of the actions of the paralytic or his friends is what caught my attention. In such Short stories whenever there is a lot of words given to seemingly less important things, like the movement of the paralytic, it makes me wonder if our author is drawing our attention to it for another reason. Perhaps white on first reading appears to be minor or secondary is actually major primary.

G.K. Beale has a great article on The Gospel Coalition Blog about Why Is the Number of the Beast 666 in Revelation 13:18. I wholeheartedly agree with him but think that there is a layer that's missing.

Robert Alter taught us but the first words and the first actions of the characters are important for their characterization, revealing depths about who they are and not surface details.

While this might seem to be a difficult question, it is actually quite simple, because it’s the same structure of every other question about a good property like justice or goodness. Something is just, loving, and beautiful if it reflects God and his justice, love, and beauty. God is eternal, the creator, and the source of all life, of everything.

Matthew has opened his story with a genealogy locating Jesus in the family of Abraham and King David. Then Matthew narrates the strange circumstances of his birth with Mary as the seventh woman in the Bible to have a story told about their inability to conceive.

There are some fascinating hints at the structure of the New Testament.4 - Gospels --> Acts (1 book) --> 7 cities/churches 4 - Letters to People --> Hebrews (1 book) --> 7 - Letters from the friends and family of Jesus

There is a beautiful chiasm in Revelation 1:14-16 that Victor M. Wilson points out in Divine Symmetries: The Art of Biblical Rhetoric.

Therefore the LORD said to Solomon, “Since this has been your practice and you have not kept my covenant and my statutes that I have commanded you, I will surely tear the kingdom from you and will give it to your servant. - 1 Kings 11:11

As you read through the book of Daniel, it is sometimes difficult to know when each chapter is taking place. Here is a handy chart:

This is the literary structure of Daniel adapted from Holbrook (The Seventy Weeks, Leviticus, and the Nature of Prophecy), Steinmann (Daniel), and Greidanus (Preaching Christ from Daniel):

The book of Deuteronomy is confusing for many. And this is because it seems to repeat a lot of the history of Israel that has already happened as well as many of the laws. I mean there’s another copy of the Ten Commandments and the title of the book itself means “second law”. But there are important differences between the first occurrence of these stories and law and the second. And when you understand the differences, you’ll understand the art and genius of Deuteronomy.

Ezekiel is a strange book and its strange in many ways. One of the ways it is strange is that there are a lot of numbers in Ezekiel. And these numbers come in two forms. First, there are dates and second, there are measurements.

“Our daughter is just like a baby hippo,” my wife says to me as I hang up my coat. up. “After we watched a video of hippos munching whole watermelons, she sat down to her own watermelon lunch. She gobbled them up with those same puffy cheeks and big eyes.” My wife finished telling me the story of the rest of her day full of reviewing Norse myths, math lessons, and dirty diapers. 

In this section we will survey the two texts that picture the week as symbolic for history: Genesis 1 and Daniel 9:24-27. Furthermore, we will give special attention to the seventh day in each text. Finally, we will consider the relation between the third day and the seventh day in Daniel. This will serve as a transition to the last section of the paper that will expound the other texts that intimate a relation between the third and seventh day.

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The Third Day in Genesis - Genesis 22 recounts the sacrifice of Isaac. After God calls for Abraham to sacrifice his son they took a servant and wood and “On the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place from afar” (Gen 22:4). It was on that day that YHWH provided a substitute and delivered Isaac from a death decree.

There is a strange abundance of occurrences of events that happen in or after “three days” or on the “third day” in the Old Testament. This oddity is highlighted when juxtaposed to events that happen on the second or fourth day. The phrase “second day” or “two days” appears 18 times while “fourth day” or “four days” appears 8 times. In contrast, “three days” and “third day” occurs 79 times.

Beauty is objective. That is, when I say that poster or a painting is beautiful or well designed, I am saying something about the work, not something about how I feel about it. I’m not offering a preference. I am saying something about the work’s nature or essence, it’s structure and the relations between its parts.

The Peanut Butter Falcon is a work of the highest literary and dramatic skill. But because it has been described by many critics as a “feel good movie” I worry that its depth, symbolism, careful attention to detail, surgical development of themes and images might be lost. So in praise of this great film, let’s look at the art of the Peanut Butter Falcon.

And this week, we're talking about that great quotation from Isaiah 7:14, “The virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel." And we will see how this is one of the most misunderstood texts in the entire Bible.

Welcome back to the Bible is Art where we explore the literary artistry of the Bible and this week we’re going to explore that great poem in Ecclesiastes 3 about time.

Genealogies might look boring. But every profession trades in particularities. Biology has cells, programmers have bits of code, and designers have colors and shapes. The particularities here are people, people particularities, the best kind.

This week we’re going to look at the art of action in stories in Plato’s Dialogues, Netflixes The Bodyguard, and the Gospel of John.

Welcome back to the Bible is Art and this week we’re starting a new series on A Christian Guide to Beauty and Design.For awhile now I’ve been writing a book. And I’ve been writing a book because it didn’t exist. You see, years ago I was teaching a high school course on Christian Worldview where we had sections on every main area of knowledge. So we had a Christian view of economics, science, ethics, mathematics and aesthetics, the study of beauty and design.

In Matthew’s Gospel, after the Angel visits Joseph and tells him to marry Mary and to name Jesus Jesus, Matthew, the narrator, tell us that “All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet” and then Matthew quotes from Isaiah, “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel.” Which means “God with us.”

Some time ago the philosopher Alain de Botton’s School of Life released a video called “How to Replace the 10 Commandments.” He said that they “maintain an extraordinary hold on our imaginations” but the problem is that they sound “peculiar” today. They were for a particular people and thus they are a bit parochial.

This is what the near last few verses in John’s Gospel says:Peter turned and saw the disciple whom Jesus loved following them, the one who also had leaned back against him during the supper and had said, “Lord, who is it that is going to betray you?”

I love John 21, the last chapter in John’s gospel. And I love it because it’s weird and there’s a lot of things to figure out. So let’s review what John 21 is about. After Jesus’ resurrection seven of his disciples go fishing during the night. They’re unfruitful in the work, not catching any fish, but in the morning, a man calls out to them from the land and gives them instructions how to fish better and then their catch is enormous.

Some of the people in Matthew’s genealogy we know about, we’ve read about them before in the grand story, in the Old Testament. But others we don’t know.

Matthew begins his gospel with an expansive, and exhaustive genealogy. Where Jesus is identified with the highest members of the Israelite family. Kings, priests, prophets, and psalmists. And in all this Jesus is this climactic cumulative character encompassing all of humanity in his body. This is the king about whom this gospel will be about.

Let's read for you the annunciation scene from Matthew’s Gospel:“Now the birth of Jesus took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. But as he considered these things, look, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream saying, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife,

The book of Exodus is organized into 3 sections that follow the Israelites from Egypt through the wilderness to Mt. Sinai. So the literary structure looks like this. Israel in Egypt, Israel in the wilderness, and Israel at Mt. Sinai.

We all know the story. Jesus is born and wise men come and bring three gifts to Jesus, Gold, frankincense, and Myrrh. But the question I want to explore is why three gifts and why these gifts.

The Peanut Butter Falcon is a work of the highest literary and dramatic skill. But because it has been described by many critics as a “feel good movie” I worry that its depth, symbolism, careful attention to detail, surgical development of themes and images might be lost. So in praise of this great film, let’s look at the art of the Peanut Butter Falcon.

Let me read to you two different styles of storytelling. First, Thomas Hardy from his book Under the Greenwood Tree:To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall. And winter, which modifies the note of such trees as shed their leaves, does not destroy its individuality. (Thomas Hardy,)

Imagine this. The wisest man whoever lives comes to town and you get to go hear him give a talk. You’re excited because you think that now he’ll be able to bring everything together, make sense of it all, provide some secret that we haven’t uncovered yet. But the first thing he says is that everything is vanity and he repeats that throughout his whole hour long talk.

Genealogies might look boring. But every profession trades in particularities. Biology has cells, programmers have bits of code, and designers have colors and shapes. The particularities here are people, people particularities, the best kind. And particularities make up the language like letters. Of course you won’t appreciate the fullness of Goethe if you don’t know german.

We often think that genealogies are lists of names, just a collection of people without any purpose or perspective. But nothing could be further from the truth.In Jesus’ family tree, there are hundreds, if not thousands of names missing.

Matthew organizes his book into alternating sections of stories and teachings. And we know this not only because we see Jesus doing things and then having long speeches but also because after each of the teaching sections Matthew repeats the same phrase, “when Jesus finished saying these things…” And Matthew does this to indicate the end of each teaching section (7:28, 11:1, 13:53, 19:1, 26:1).

The first sentence in Matthew’s Gospel is this, “The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ.” Why start this way? By the time we get to Matthew’s Gospel, we’re in the fifth act of a five act play, we’re at the end of the story, so where are we in the story, what’s happening?

One of the difficult questions in Judges 1 is whether it was right for Judah to invite Simeon to lead the fight against the Canaanites given that God had said that Judah was supposed to lead. Often when there are multiple interpretive options if there is an allusion to another text, that can provide the correct perspective.

Ruth and Esther are the only two books with primary female protagonists. Ruth is about a foreigner coming into Israel and Esther is about an Israelite going into a foreign society.

Luke 12 opens with a description of the setting, "...many thousands of the people had gathered together that they were trampling one another." While this may seem that Luke includes this to emphasize the quantity of people gathering to hear Jesus speak, there are indications that this is not the reason or not the only reason.

By the time we get to Matthew’s Gospel, we’re in the fifth act of a five act play, we’re at the end of the story, so where are we in the story, what’s happening?

Inception ends with a riddle. The movie is about dreams and reality. And each character has an object, called a totem, that works differently in the real world and in dreams. Cobb, played by Leonardo Dicaprio, has a spinning top that works normally in the real world but never stops spinning, never falls over when he’s in a dream. The top tells him what’s real and what’s fake.

It’s a common literary technique to use physical things for metaphorical reasons. For instance in Dante’s Divine Comedy, Dante is on a physical journey from hell to heaven that is meant to be a metaphor for his spiritual journey or in the Bible, Israel’s physical wilderness wanderings for 40 years are meant to be metaphorical of their spiritual wanderings.

Why does Matthew provide the original words of Jesus in Aramaic, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani”. Matthew never gives us any other Aramaic, so why here?

There are only two scenes in a garden in all four gospels and both of them are in John: the garden of Gethsemane (chapter 18) and the garden of resurrection (chapter 20-21).

There’s a connection between Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar. Nebuchadnezzar has dreams and Daniel has dreams. The narrator gives first person sections to both Nebuchadnezzar and Daniel, and both include a lengthy prayer. So why is the author paralleling these characters.

Gnostics were a strange bunch. Their oddity is intimated in the wild divergences of their practices. For some, the valuation of spirit over matter, immateriality over corporeality, signaled a license to baccenalian festivity . . .

We look at Scripture for our hermeneutic for looking at the world. What does that tell us, then, that Scripture is 1/3 poetry?

My son (5 yrs old) asked my male cousin (15 yrs old) to build his new Lego contraption that he received. My cousin agreed and built it for him. It struck me . . .

The layers of meaning of Scripture unfold the further we read. In the Garden, we ate with God . . .

“My God, my God, Thou art a direct God, may I not say a literal God, a God that wouldest bee understood literally, and according to the plain sense of all that thou saiest? But thou art also (Lord, I intend it to thy glory, and let no profane misinterpreter abuse it to thy diminution), thou art a figurative, a metaphorical God too . . .

I am excited to work through a new volume entitled “The Song of Songs and the Eros of God: A Study in Biblical Intertextuality” by Edmée Kingsmill. This is her dissertation from Oxford. Ellen F. Davis has a nice review. Here are some highlights . . .

We are always told in hermeneutics classes that something is lost in translation. I agree. But what if something is gained? What if there is an excess of meaning and poetics in Scripture such that translations release more meanings, variations, and permutations, not contradictory but confirmatory and glorifying of the original message?

In Leviticus 14:33-57 details the procedures for house leprosy. If the owner of the owner of the house thinks the house may have leprosy, then he goes to the priest and the priest inspects it. If it seems to be below the surface, then the priest comes back on the seventh day to inspect it again. If it is indeed house leprosy, the house is torn down . . .

<p>“Historical-critical scholarship has received insufficient literary training, or no training at all, with fatal consequences. The story-tellers, th...

the bible is literature and does not want to waste its energy on the option of “the bible as literature”

Begbie argues that western music has at times been too intellectualistic and denied to somatic necessity in music

"In hearing music it is not necessary to seek information about the causes of the sounds, nor do we have to identify a referent or referents, sound is employed largely in a way which opens up spatiality which does not depend on the discrete location and mutual exclusion of entities . . .

The passage is replete with redundancies, confusion of gender, omitted articles, missing verbs, obscure allusions, incomplete and garbled statements (v. 11), as well as words, forms, and constructions unheard of elsewhere . . . [S]ome of the textual problems may reflect the prophet’s emotional excitement . . . The end is at hand. There is no time to worry about fine literary style

The phrase “The word of the Lord came to me” occurs 50 times in Ezekiel. The four time is in 7:1. In 7:2, YHWH speaks of a four-fold destruction of Israel: “And you, O son of man, thus says the Lord God to the land of Israel: An end! The end has come upon the four corners of the land.”

“A close reading of the exchange between son and father (“But where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” – “God will provide himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my son”) may enable us to fill in the gap and reconstruct the father’s thoughts after a fashion.

Rikk Watts points out that we have no intertestamental literature that connects the “Son of David” to healing. Furthermore, there are no OT texts that explicitly make that connection either. The Pharisees do not understand Jesus, but these two blind men do . . .

In Ezekiel’s second vision he is brought to the Jerusalem temple “to the entrance of the gateway of the inner court that faces north, where was the seat of the image of jealousy, which provokes to jealousy” (Ezek 8:3).

I don’t know exactly what to make of this, but here it goes. In the temple bread and wine are more holy than their symbolic parallels in the courtyard: meat and blood. In Numbers, Israel complains about the bread and God gives them meat. They think this this is a greater gift, but it is really a demotion in holiness.

One of my interests right now is canonical ordering. I am completely convinced that the MT ordering is the correct. Thus, Chronicles is the last book in the OT. The end of 2 Chron is a quotation of Cyrus’ decree to build the temple . . .

In Matt 2 the astrologers see the star that leads them to Christ. Clearly, that has an Isaianic context. In Matt 1, there is an allusion to Isaiah 7 concerning Immanuael. In Is 7:11, YHWH says, “Ask a sign of the Lord your God; let it be deep as Sheol or high as heaven.” Thus, the star is the sign in heaven.

Not that the connection between blood and wine was ever in doubt (cf. Gen 49), but note the parallel in the sacrificial cult: the bread of the face and the sacrifices (most everything save the blood) could be eaten but the wine/beer and blood of the sacrifices could not . . .

In Matthew’s Gospel Jesus recapitulates Israel’s story (see Peter Leithart’s paper “Jesus as Israel: The Typological Structure of Matthew’s Gospel”). After Jesus’ 40 day fast, he is tempted by the Devil and resists using three quotations from Deuteronomy . . .

Genesis 1-3 contains many micro-cosmic elements. The creation week is symbolic of human history moving towards Sabbath, the day moves from evening to morning symbolizing the history’s eschatological movement towards the “Day of the Lord”, etc . . .

Victor Sasson has an interesting article in Biblica Vol 79 (1998) entitled “The Literary and Theological Function of Job’s Wife in the Book of Job”. He argues inter alia, against a negative reading by Clines, that “Job’s wife is not a major character in the dramatis personae . . . She plays a minor role”. I don’t think this is exactly on the mark . . .