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The world commended to us in Holy Scripture—as the real world to be inhabited by faith—is, in fact, a properly theological reality which is grounded in the Christian confession of the Triune God and of His good and holy purposes for His creation.

What can we as Protestants in the western tradition glean from the Eastern Orthodox regarding this notion of theosis? What theological pitfalls should we guard against in thinking on this topic, and how can Calvin's doctrine of union with Christ help us?

This particular lecture considers how the Exodus serves as a paradigm for redemption in Christ and Christ's relationship to the Church, and therefore as a paradigm for the marriage relationship.

Leviticus 15 depicts intercourse and its physiology as a tabernacle scene. It places ordinary and proper sexual intercourse at the center (v. 18), and, as the chiastic structure makes clear, varying levels or degrees of impurity occupy the surrounding "areas" of that center just as in Israel's encampment and wilderness.

I cannot refuse the Church while I plead for her health: after all, in divine grace, the solution is in her, too. Yes, in her. As I point to what the Church must become in order to be, in deed and not just in word, the safest place for a woman, I will ask us to love our Mother:

Modern criticism has functioned for at least a century with a default reading of Leviticus which regards it as undeniable proof-positive that the Bible is part of the problem. Instead of dismissing this notion, attending to it carefully enriches our appreciation of how Leviticus is in fact part of the solution.

The statutes and ordinances of the Law, the narratives, a wide range of biblical types and figures, the wisdom literature, and the New Testament Gospels and Writings all commend to us a vision of the unique theo-ontology of a woman as a kind of sacred space.

I would like to invite you into the biblical solution for a grievous problem—the principled maltreatment of women in culture and too often in the Church—by way of a most intriguing and theologically rich biblical motif: the eschatological ultimacy of the feminine as a kind of sacred space.

There is much talk of church planting, missions, doctrinal orthodoxy, and the rosiest versions of a given denominational history. Meanwhile men are harming their wives and calling it an exercise of their headship.

Reading Mary forces such questions as we endeavor to do justice not only to her, a mother of the Faith, but to the One who has written of her precisely in the ways and in the time he did, and who has called us to hear what he says well.

Reading Mary forces such questions as we endeavor to do justice not only to her, a mother of the Faith, but to the One who has written of her precisely in the ways and in the time he did, and who has called us to hear what he says well.

For far too long, many have approached these questions within the ambit of that poorly disguised and misnomered field of inquiry, "practical theology," where so much is "practical" and so little is "theological." But domestic violence is in fact a rather prominent biblical theme, requiring serious exegetical labor if we will hear the Word faithfully.

If I had a flair for the dramatic, I would say patriarchy died on November 23, 2013. There is some truth in that claim, though it's a truth having more to do with the world of scholarship than the everyday realities many people live with. Instead of going that route, then, I will suggest that November 23, 2013 is one of the most important dates in the convoluted story of patriarchy in the world of biblical scholarship. It is at least a date students of the topic should try to remember.

The curtain has been drawn. The questions have been sharpened, the stakes clarified, and the issues focused. And the dust is starting, it seems, to settle. Now -- now -- is the time to stretch our reading to the other side of this debate, to add Davidson to Davenant, Block to Bavinck, Collins to Cyril, Milgrom to Monothelitism.

In an insightful recent post, Christopher Cleveland explains "Why the Trinitarian Controversy Was Inevitable." Cleveland's diagnosis is perceptive, and I would like to extend it somewhat further and also suggest a way forward in terms of the opportunities our situation presents. Cleveland points to the neglect, and in some quarters the rejection, of properly theological work which lasted decades.