Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In the Bible, all the world is a stage, but like the Tabernacle, that stage moves around a lot. David’s defeat of Goliath can only be fully understood as liturgy fulfilled in history. Liturgy, as a sacrifice of praise, is the step-by-step process of resolving a conflict. It relinquishes all…
Aristotle isn’t fundamentally wrong about friendship, nor is the long tradition that follows him. But you might not gather that by reading some of the more pointed critics of the classical conception of friendship. I think, however, that the classical view is not only viable but taken up and fulfilled…
#13 in Theopolis Papers, Seeking Integration in a Fragmented World It is time for me to “cast off” integration, the way a knitter removes a completed scarf from the needles. I want to bring my quest concerning integration to a decent closure, though my happy quest for reality continues. With…
Below are some notes on a particular sub-theme of Daniel 3, namely the downfall of Babylon’s liturgy. First up, a few words on our text’s literary construction. One of the most conspicuous features of Dan. 3 is its author’s love of lists . Personnel are listed (vs. 2, 3, 27),…
Few things in Scripture, few things in the Christian life, are more familiar than the Lord’s Prayer. Sunday after Sunday, we pray these words together with our brothers and sisters. At home, alone or with our families, we pray this prayer daily, as Jesus taught us (Luke 11:2: “When you…
At the 2019 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America, the denominational delegates considered a number of official overtures (requests for action from the regional parts of the denomination) relating to issues of gender and sexuality. The PCA is conservative. As evidence of this, the assembly passed a resolution…
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O’Regan ( Theology and the Spaces of Apocalyptic , 113-4) deftly captures the limits and use of Derrida. Limits first, and there are severe: Derrida is not “adequate for Christian theology,” he argues, because “as theo -logy, there is presumtively a reality whose very nature it seems it to self-disclose,…
Christian reception of the work of Walter Benjamin is often set in the context of Christian reception of Jewish messianism or Jewish apocalyptic. In a brilliant summary of Benjamin, Cyril O’Regan ( Theology and the Spaces of Apocalyptic , 61-8) contests this characterization. Despite Benjamin’s claim that he is settled…
The Spirit is upon the Servant of Yahweh (Isaiah 61:1), and where the Spirit is, there is new creation (cf. Genesis 1:2). The mission of the Servant is fittingly described in a complex of seven infinitive clauses (vv. 1-3): A) Yahweh anointed Me 1) to proclaim good news to the…
The Servant of Yahweh is anointed to proclaim the “acceptable year of Yahweh” and the “day of vengeance of our God” and to comfort the mourners (Isaiah 61:2). These are not opposites. They proclaim the same fact from different angles, and the connection is underscored by a Hebrew play on…
The word “liberty” ( deror ) is rarely used in the Hebrew Bible, and the terms for its use are set by Leviticus 25, the laws of Jubilee. There, liberty includes the freeing of slaves, as whenZedekiah proclaims liberty to slaves (Jeremiah 34:8-16). But the specific liberty that is proclaimed…
Some months ago, I wrote a brief piece on the “tragedy” of conversion .I used the word “tragedy” in the sense I develop in Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, & Hope In Western Literature . The word describes a conception of history and metaphysics in which the original is by definition…
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