Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In this essay we will think about how the whole Bible is structured as one Word of God. To begin with, there is only one Bible, not two. While we divide the Bible into Old and New Testaments, that division has no more meaning than divisions into chapters and verse,…
How should one badly bruised and inadequate church relate to another? (I am not addressing the blessed possessors of absolutely perfect churches, naturally.) I believe there are three things to bear in mind. First, we must be open to the values in other Christian traditions - even Roman Catholic and…
The third and sixth day have a second creative act. Note the chiastic arrangement of the material in these special acts and the parallelism between them, see the figure below. The author arranges the description of each day as a chiasm. Each line in the chiasm is mated with a…
Now the two of them were naked, the man and his woman, and they did not sense shame (Genesis 2:25) The nakedness of Adam and Eve requires several comments. First of all, against those who think that nakedness is what God intended for humanity as a permanent estate, we have…
I’ve been reflecting on the meaning of integration, and our longing for integration in a fragmented world. I’ve been connecting my own covenant epistemology further with the thought of scientist-philosopher Michael Polanyi, artist Makoto Fujimura, and Classical Christian metaphysician D.C. Schindler. In my last post , and now in this…
Luke 13:31-33 is one of the strangest passages in the Gospel of Luke. It begins with a time note that sounds emphatic “At that very hour.” Then, we are told of Pharisees bringing a message that Herod wants to kill Jesus! In His answer, Jesus speaks of a three day…
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At the beginning of her discussion of Christian architecture in the Renaissance and Reformation, Jeanne Kilde ( Sacred Power, Sacred Space: An Introduction to Christian Architecture and Worship ) writes: “In the Renaissance period, the medieval notion of the church as the City of Heaven yielded to new ideas about…
John Paul II’s meditations on creation as gift in Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology Of The Body (180-1) are deeply stimulating. He begins from the observation that the gift of creation is a “radical” gift, that is, a gift that constitutes the recipient in the giving, “an…
In Piers the Plowman (9), William Langland recounts the story of the sons of God and the daughters of men. Though he extrapolates from the text, he gets the story right (I am quoting from the Penguin Classics edition, Piers the Ploughman (Penguin Classics) ): “All Cain’s progeny came to…
Hyde ( The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property , 50-51) distinguishes between “work” and “labor.” The first is what we do by the hour. Labor has its own pace, and there is no timetable or tool to make it work more efficiency: “Writing a poem, developing a…
Lewis Hyde has some wonderful reflections on the “labor of gratitude” in his The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (47-51): With “transformative gifts,” the recipient of the gift “feels gratitude. I would like to speak of gratitude as a labor undertaken by the soul to effect the…
Godbout ( The World of the Gift , 209-10) gives this searing critique of Girard. For Girard, he says, “violence is primary . . . no love is possible. There are only hatred and ‘desire.’” Girard’s own analysis undercuts his theory: “In his discussion of the judgment of Solomon, Girard…
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