Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The “second Reformation” introduced Reformed liturgy and teaching into Lutheran Germany. This was seen by some as a continuation of the Reformation and a purgation of Catholic remnants. The effort to carry on “further reformation” led to disputes with Lutherans. As Bodo Nischan has put it, the hottest debate in…
In J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century , Tom Shippey observes that Bilbo is a member of the middle class, a bourgeois. Bilbo does not have any servants, but his hole is “the home of a member of the Victorian upper-middle class of Tolkien’s nineteenth-century youth, full of…
Idolatry has deprived Israel of her senses. This was one of the early messages to Isaiah (Isaiah 6). Yahweh sent him out to a people who had been deprived of their senses because of their commitment to idols. They become like the idols they serve. They still have eyes, but…
In the current climate of Trinitarian discussion concerning personhood, it's good to reach back to David Bentley Hart's treatment of the subject in his wonderful Beauty of the Infinite . Hart addresses the dangers of misreading Rahner’s rule, namely, the danger of dissolving the ontological Trinity into the economic. In…
Chris Kou is the oldest son of Chinese immigrants. Chris and his brothers run a branding and marketing business, Imagineering, in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. In his spare time, he takes online courses from Reformed Theological Seminary, and aspires to be a pastor. Chris is also one of our…
The following was delivered as the Solemn Charge and Exhortation to Theopolis students beginning the Easter term course on Architecture and Liturgical Space . As we will be reminded repeatedly throughout the week, the Bible has a lot to say about building and buildings. Long stretches of Exodus, Kings, Chronicles,…
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William Dembski's latest, Being As Communion , sets out a metaphysics of information, and argues for what he calls “informational realism.” Reality is information all the way down, but that information is real. It is reality. What is information? Dembski says it's “about realizing possibilities by ruling out others. Unless…
John's account of the resurrection fulfills the promise of his prologue (John 20). Here is the Word made flesh, dead and buried, now risen as new Adam, the “gardener,” with Mary Magdalene, a type of the new Eve. The Word who spoke the worlds into being speaks also after death,…
Elijah's life (1 Kings 17-19) tracks that of Moses. He confronts the Pharaoh-like King Ahab, then flees from the land, as Moses fled to Midian, where he is cared for by a widow. God provides miraculously for the prophet and his host, but then her child dies. In the Moses…
Paul Griffiths's Decreation has some harrowing passages about sin. Like this one: “What will be left of me when I am no longer a sinner? That is a question fundamental to trembling before hell's presence in the devastation [i.e., the fallen world]. Such trembling, however, like all well-formed Christian responses,…
A wondrous passage from Donne: “all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by…
Thomas considers acedia, “sloth,” as the opposite of delight. It is “sadness directed toward what ought to yield delight” (summary by Paul Griffiths, Decreation , 196). Paul Griffiths glosses: Acedia “is the mark of those sufficiently habituated to looking at nothing that when they look at something—and most especially at…
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