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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Polkinghorne is better when he points to the import of the remarkable fact that we can understand the inner structure of the universe: “our human ability to understand the universe far exceeds anything that could reasonably be considered as simply an evolutionary necessity, or as a happy spin-off from that…
John Polkinghorne writes that the “human writings [of Scripture] bear witness to timeless truths, but they do so in the thought forms and from the cultural milieu of their writers.” As a result, “we find attitudes expressed in the Bible that today we neither an nor should agree with.” This…
The Word became flesh. He assumed everything that flesh is heir to - all our weakness, all our sorrow, all our sickness and shatteredness, all our godforsakenness, He took to Himself. But not merely to identify or sympathize. He took it to Himself to overcome it. He goes to the…
Balthasar again: “For fundamental theology, the heart of the matter should be the question: ‘How does God’s revelation confront man in history? How is it perceived?’ But under the influence of a modern rationalistic concept of science, the question shifted ever more from its proper center to the margin, to…
Balthasar resolves the dilemma between rationalistic and fideistic approaches to faith and reason by identifying a common flaw in them, and by proposing an aesthetic solution. The common flaw, he thinks, is that both rationalists and fideists “are wont to call the historical facts of revelation ‘signs,’ and to think…
Von Balthasar summarizes Roman Guardini’s insistence that “form is not only corporeal” by saying “The eye sees the life of plants in their kind of coloration, in the manner of their movements as brought about by air and contact. The eye sees the vitality of the animal. In man, it…
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