You know it’s going to be an exciting novel when it wins awards for fantasy, science fiction and horror all at once! American Gods is a modern-day mythic tale by Neil Gaiman. All I want to do here is take a look at the novel’s intriguing premise.
The answer ‘theology’ to the question ‘what are you studying?’ is often a conversation killer with my friends at the gym. They’re shocked because it’s an unusual answer (“I expected you to say something like nursing!”) or sometimes aren’t entirely sure what it is. Then there’s the question of what […]
We saw a link between God’s preference for Israel and the nations’ praise in Psalm 96 and 67 but what about God’s punishment of the nations and their defeat? Psalms 47 and 87 help us to address this.
So far in this series we’ve seen 4 themes about the nations in the Psalms: God rules the nations Defeat of the nations Calls for the nations to praise God Israel among the nations Just because the defeat of the nations is the most common reference doesn’t make it God’s […]
If we assume that the Psalter has been put together with purpose rather than just randomly, we can expect that its shape will help us to understand its theology, including what God’s attitude to the nations is. One way to do that is by looking at how the Psalter starts […]
I found about about 80 references to ‘the nations’ in the psalms. (I counted two different Hebrew words for ‘nations’ plus references to specific nations like Cush or Egypt.) Then I tried to work out the key themes. Here are the four categories I found:
“God’s attitude” Depending on whether you think the book of Psalms is words to God or words from God will affect how you read it. For example, if you think the sole purpose of the Psalms is to praise God, you probably won’t expect to find much about what God […]
Meet Jesus at uni 