Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Mrs. Marguerite Lane of Grand Rapids writes to ask if I have ever noticed a correlation between the eight beatitudes of Matthew 5 and the eight woes of Matthew 23. I confess that I have not. A glance at various commentators reveals that such a correspondence does not seem to…
1. The words of Agur, the son of Jakeh, the burden. The man declares to Ithiel, to Ithiel and Ucal: 2. Surely I am more stupid than any other man, And I do not have the understanding of a man. 3. And I have not learned wisdom, But I have…
Psalm 137 is widely regarded as one of the meanest of the imprecatory psalms. Certainly as we read it it is seems to be a song of pure vengeance. The exiles in Babylon, in grief over the judgment that Babylon has brought upon them, pray for the destruction of that…
In the Levitical law, the priests received two particular portions of each peace offering: the "wave offering" of the breast and the "heave offering" (or better, "contribution") of the right thigh. The purpose of this essay is to attempt to determine the reason why the second of these, the thigh,…
The story of Jesus’ visit, early in His ministry, to the synagogue in His home town of Nazareth is recorded for us in Luke 4:16-30. You may remember that Jesus read from Isaiah about how the Messiah would preach the gospel, care for the poor, work miracles, and bring in…
(The essay that follows concerns a rather touchy subject: how the Lord’s Supper is to be done. I am not writing to insult or offend, but to challenge. To that end I have not "held back" but have "gone ahead" and said what I think needs to be said —…
Showing page 308 of 309
Showing page 10 of 43
D arren Grem's forthcoming The Blessings of Business is a study of the money men behind mid-20th century Evangelicalism. It's a revealing book, once one skims off Grem's premises, which seem to be: Evangelical ministry takes money, wealthy people provide the money. Grem seems to think this a scandal. It's…
W riting on Catholic education in a 1990 America essay , Walter Ong pushed the discussion of Catholic identity back to the roots: What is the “catholicity” of “Catholic”? “‘Catholic,'” he observed, “is commonly said to mean ‘universal,' a term from the Latin universalis .” But this doesn't fit the…
W hy isn't the Hebrew Bible taken seriously as a text of philosophy, ethics, or political thought? That it isn't is obvious. As Yoram Hazony observes in his The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture , his graduate training at Rutgers all but ignored the Bible: “political theory and the history of…
M ikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita has an epigraph from Goethe's Faust , and the novel is full of Faustian elements. Both involve temptation, the Satanic ball that Margarita attends resembles nothing so much as Faust's Walpurgis night, and the romantic overlay to a story of devilish temptation is…
I n an 1851 essay on “Catholicism” published in the Mercersburg Review , John Williamson Nevin unpacked the notion that the church is “catholic” or “universal.” He distinguished two ways of understanding the church's universality—as “all” or as “whole.” If the church is catholic as “all,” then it is an…
W hile Athenian philosophy was in many respects quite distant from the political cosmologies that characterized the great Near Eastern empires,” writes Yoram Hazony ( The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture ), “it continued to develop their view of man as being essentially a creature of the state that governs him,…
Showing page 280 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
