Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
"The faithful use of sacraments, and indeed a fully sacramental view of creation, is vital to the life of the Church. Baptism and the Lord's Supper are rites that directly shape the community and the Body, because they were given by God for that express purpose. A deficient practice of…
Weightlessness is fun. At the beginning of Gravity (2013) , we can see one astronaut dancing the Macarena and another one playing with his jetpack. They like it out there in the space. Apart from zero-gravity they can enjoy beautiful views, and even the silence is likable, although Matt Kowalski…
I recently went to a lunch that is more or less quarterly. About a dozen of us go. It is a lunch held in honor of a retired professor of religion and philosophy. I have been one of his acquaintances for more than 40 years. In his tenure as professor,…
Why Theopolis? Don't we already have seminaries and Bible colleges and other institutions for theological education? Why do we need another one? I get this question now and again. I ask myself this question even more often. What follows is a partial answer. Back in the 1990s, seminaries seemed to…
I think the logic of the Lutheran Reformation can be summarized in one sentence, attributed to Luther himself: "God does not need your good works, but your neighbor does." The first half of that statement is justification by faith . God doesn't need our works to satisfy his justice or…
If you are looking to start a fight with Christians, there is hardly a better subject to do so than the arts. Music, movies, paintings, and literature have provided no small battlegrounds for Christians to war. We are emotionally invested in the arts. A song, a book, or a film…
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C J Labuschagne ( Numerical Secrets of the Bible ) discovers repeated numero-literary uses of the numbers 17 and 26 in the Old Testament. Texts are comprised of multiples of one or the other of these numbers. Why? 26 is relatively easy: It's the gematria of Yahweh, the sum of…
D uring Wittgenstein's hiatus from philosophy in the 1920s, he worked for an architect to build a home for his sister Margarete. His task was to design the door and window handles. As Christopher Benfey points out in a splendid essay on handles at the NYRB , this was no…
J ohn Williamson Nevin is remembered, when he is remembered at all, for his anti-revivalist and pro-sacramental writings. Those more familiar with his work know of his catholicity and his emphasis on the centrality of the Incarnation to the Christian vision of reality. On of the great virtues of Richard…
I n his contribution to Ritual and Metaphor: Sacrifice in the Bible , Christian Eberhart points out that the term qorban is Leviticus's generic term for the variety of offerings used in tabernacle worship. The terminology “captures the dynamic movement of sacrificial material toward the sanctuary and ultimately toward God…
H uman beings,” asserts Andy Clark at the beginning of his Natural-Born Cyborgs , “are natural- born cyborgs” (3). By that, he means that “the human mind, if it is to be the physical organ of human reason, simply cannot be seen as bound and restricted by the biological skinbag.…
O f late, many within the evangelical Protestant world have been calling for some form of ressourcement , renewed attention to the early church's creeds, theologians, liturgies, and practices. Michael Bird's What Christians Ought To Believe is one of the best of the lot. Bird, a New Testament scholar at…
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