Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Flying scrolls. Red horses. Beasts coming out of the sea. Winged women. The list goes on. Apocalyptic literature in the Bible is like a cross between science fiction and Marvel comics. And the Bible has a fair bit of this sort of thing. Daniel sees visions in Babylon, Zechariah sees…
Trinity House Institute has taken a new name, the Theopolis Institute. This striking new name expresses our unique vision and mission and captures the unified purpose behind all our specific programs and activities. We still have Bible, liturgy, and culture in our tagline. We still offer the same courses on…
Adam Kotsko offers a socio-political variation on the Christus Victor atonement theory in his 2010 study, The Politics of Redemption: The Social Logic of Salvation . He does this by explaining "the devil" in terms of the Hegelian concept of "objective spirit," Geist . As Kotsko puts it, Geist "refers…
Two factors keep Nahtali Meshel from discussing the meaning of sacrifice until late in his The "Grammar" of Sacrifice . The first has to do with the texts he draws from: "P says little about the meaning of its rituals" (174). The other has to do with the grammatical theory…
Chapter 5 of Naphtali Meshel's The "Grammar" of Sacrifice focuses on "praxemics," the physical actions of sacrificial ritual. Praxemes are constituted by six elements: an "atomact," an elementary physical act or gesture; an actor; an object that is acted up; a target for the action and often for the object…
Two chapters of Naphtali Meshel’s The “Grammar” of Sacrifice cover what he calls “jugation” and “hierarchies.” The first involves the addition of other materials to an animal offering. Jugates include wine, cereal, and oil that are added to the animals (zoemes) that are offered in sacrifice. Some jugates are coordinated…
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Revelation seems to be the province of fundamentalists, dispensationalists, popapocalyptics. It's far too cartoonish, stark, violent, demanding to be at home in the mainline. Craig Koester ( Revelation and the End of All Things ) points out that mainline churches actually hear very little of the Apocalypse in church. The…
Yahweh brings a devastating judgment on His own people and on Edom, slaughtering and destroying them. He empties the land of Edom, and fills their cities with wild animals (Isaiah 34-35). What has this got to do with us? Everything. What Isaiah depicts is a figure of the gospel story.…
God only speaks twice directly to the reader in Revelation, Craig Koester points out ( Revelation and the End of All Things , 51). He says the same thing both times: “I am the Alpha and the Omega . . . who is and who was and who comes, the…
You get the gist of Rajan Menon's argument from the title of his forthcoming book: The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention . The position he opposes is based on the assumption that the end of the Cold War fundamentally altered geopolitical conditions, and that our contemporary interconnected world is converging toward…
Janine Barchas ( Matters of Fact in Jane Austen ) says that Austen's world had a nascent celebrity culture. Baronets were well known; court scandals made news. There was an 18th-century equivalent of the National Inquirer and paparazzi. Austen knew this world, and she makes references to it in her…
In The Myth of Liberalism , John Safranek observes that recent Supreme Court decisions identify freedom with autonomy: “both restrain the government from interfering with an individual's personal and self-defining decisions” (109). As the majority said in Casey , the right to self-definition is “at the heart of liberty,” such…
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