Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
"Vanity of vanities", says the Preacher. "All is vanity". Life, we are told in the book of Ecclesiastes, is a repetitious, wearisome cycle; all that is and all that will be has already been. There is nothing new under the sun. What is crooked cannot be made straight, what is…
The Bible tells us that when God created the earth, He set up three zones of life. The first was the world itself. The second was the holy land of Eden. And the third was the Garden in Eden, God’s sanctuary. God told Adam and Eve that every tree was…
In our survey of Biblical chronology we have arrived at the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, which provide chronological information for the period after the return from exile, the Restoration Period of Old Testament history. The question we begin to address in this essay is whether the Artaxerxes of these…
These verses from the Sermon on the Mount are generally taken in connection with Jesus’ earlier statement concerning adultery in the heart (vv. 27-28); the eye and the hand have obvious relevance to the sin of adultery. At the same time, most commentators admit that the principle of avoiding occasions…
17. The eye that mocks a father, And despises to obey a mother, The ravens of the valley will pick it out, And the young eagles will eat it. 18. There are three things that are too wonderful for me, Four that I do not understand: 19. The way of…
The modern Church in America and virtually everywhere else is ideology-centered, not geographical. This is because various Churches believe different things and have different customs of worship and sacraments. The ideological Church has gradually developed from the time of the Reformation, because accuracy of doctrine has become more important to…
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According to Michael Nerlich ( Ideology of Adventure ), “all figures of the Greek and Latin novels of adventure are ‘involuntary’ adventurers.” Mikhail Bakhtin too ( Dialogic Imagination ) emphasizes that in earlier adventures “an individual can be nothing other than completely passive, completely unchanging” and function as “merely the…
Winder McConnell ( Nibelungenleid , 98-99) sketches the changing uses of the epic in the mid-20 th century: “During the Weimar Republic, the themes and motifs of the Nibelungenlied had been employed by authors of antirepublican persuasion to express optimism for Germany’s future, but poets and dramatists sympathetic to the…
In an essay in A Companion to Gottfried of Strassburg's Tristan , Ulrich Muller argues that “In Tristan und Isolde Wagner radically transformed the meaning and message of Gottfried’s romance, just as he had in Parsifal. As cast by Gottfried (and in all medieval versions), the lovers and their love…
Andreas Capellanus literally wrote the book on the Art of Courtly Love , but the concluding Book 3 suggests that the book was a cautionary tale throughout. Capellanus closes the treatise with an exhortation to Walter, the man to whom the book is addressed to abstain from the desires of…
Even today, when historians have abandoned the idea, many regard the Middle Ages as a time dark and ignorant, the huddled masses in shadows until the burst of light that came with the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment. For centuries, it is often thought, medieval thinkers knew little of the…
Allegorization was one of the techniques medieval used, adapted from ancient writers, to incorporate pagan writing in a biblical framework. As Ernst Curtius ( European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages ) writes, “the Middle Ages subjected profane writers to allegorical interpretation exactly as it did the Bible, and .…
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