Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In the Bible, fatness is such a blessing, that it is especially hard to understand why wicked men are permitted to enjoy such a state. It requires a theodicy and faith in God. Thus: “For they have no pangs until death; their bodies are fat and sleek . They are…
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The allusion to the Exodus story is contained in the first words of Deuteronomy 14:1 — “ye are the sons of Yahweh your God” — as well as in 14:2 in the use of the technical term translated “treasured possession,” “His own possession,” “peculiar people,” “precious people,” and so forth.…
I have argued that Deuteronomy 14:1-21 is an independent literary unit that applies the Third Word to the lives of Israelites from the time of Moses and Joshua. In this short pericope, Moses suggests broad and deep meaning by means of literary allusion to the stories of the creation and…
In his recently republished The New Creation , the late, delightful Herbert McCabe defends the priesthood of the plebs as roundly as anyone could want. Citing Hebrews, he claims that "there is an essential difference between the Christian community and the community of the Old Law, or any other religious…
Augustine famously prayed, “Our hearts our restless until they rest in You.” True indeed. Being creatures, we inherently sense our ontological poverty—our innate condition of dependence—and are compelled to find a sense of security. And it is also true—as Augustine’s own narrative painfully illustrates—that one of the things we most…
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When it’s all said and done, Rahner multiplies levels of nature and the supernatural. There is the purely conceptual “pure nature,” which has never existed in reality but must be possible if we are to think grace as grace. There are actually existing natures, the concrete reality of created beings.…
Some thoughts on Book 19 of Augustine’s City of God, mostly taken from an article by Oliver O’Donovan (the revised version of the essay published in O’Donovan and O’Donovan, Bonds of Imperfection). O’Donovan points out that the the issues in this book are broadly moral rather than specifically political. It…
In the opening pages of his Theology After Wittgenstein , Fergus Kerr, O.P., mounts a Wittgensteinian critique of Rahner’s epistemology, which, he concludes, is thoroughly indebted to Cartestian philosophy. Due to the influence of Cartesian categories, Kerr sees Rahner’s theology determined by “an extremely mentalist-individualist epistemology” that contributes to a…
One of Dabney’s answers to the charge that imputation is unjust is tat “God forbids imputation of capital guilt by human magistrates,” but “He customarily claims the exercise of it in His own government.” The difference he explains by saying “Human magistrates are themselves under law, in common with those…
Several students have observed the parallels between Peter’s denial in John 18 and the denial of Jesus by the Jews in chapter 19. Peter denies three times, in a pattern of 1 + 2; so do the Jews. Between then, contrasting to these denials, is Pilate’s threefold confession of Jesus’…
Dabney thinks that Calvinists have offered “unsatisfactory” answers to objections to its doctrine of definite atonement. Two sorts of objections in particular: “From the universal offer of atonement through Christ, and from Scripture.” He answers these objections, and then goes on into a detailed discussion of the “relation of limited…
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