Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
If utopia is a perfect place or at least the best possible social arrangement, it must be a very dull place where any change is a change for worse and not for better, where nothing can be new and good at the same time. There can be no conflict in…
Christians, even those who say much about ‘incarnational’ faith, can say surprisingly little about the way that God claims our bodies . Perhaps this is most striking in treatments of baptism, where the intensely bodily character of the rite would especially seem to invite comment. Even if the term ‘baptism’…
Dear Pastor, I believe the locus of the difference between us is your statement here: "There are mothers who choose to risk their lives and even die to preserve the fetus, there are those who wouldn't. There are the circumstances of the individual, family, income, community, illness, risk factors, etc..…
New Year’s resolutions for weight loss are practically on the liturgical calendar of America. Somewhere around the beginning of a new year, people resolve that they will get in better shape. Some are made to feel guilty by the obesity police in our country (whose standards are, many times, very…
Click HERE for Part 1 After sending my letter to the local pastors, I received a long and thoughtful post from one of the local pastors, and it was sent not just to me, but to all of the pastors whom I e-mailed. Unfortunately, I do not feel I can…
Narrative and story have been all the rage in theology for the last few decades. The attractions are obvious. Narrative theologians favor the active, unpredictable, vibrant God of Scripture to the impersonal first principle of philosophical theology. Narrative theologians reject the notion that theologians need to justify their work by…
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Apringius Latin Commentaries on Revelation (Ancient Christian Texts) , 25-6) offers a fascinating numerological interpretation of Jesus’ declaration that He is Alpha and Omega. The numerical value of Omega is 800, and so is the Greek word peristera , “dove.” Alpha adds a 1 to this, and thus Jesus’ self-description…
From Irenaeus on, the vast majority of patristic and medieval commentators have claimed that Revelation was written during the reign of Domitian in the mid-90s AD. There have been a few dissidents, the most famous of which was Epiphanius of Salamis (fifth century), who may reflect an independent tradition in…
Julianus Pomerius, who directed a school in sixth-century Gaul, emphasized straightforward, unadorned preaching. “A teacher of the Church should not parade an elaborate style,” he writes in his The Contemplative Life , “lest he seem not to want to edify the Church of God but to reveal what great learning…
With my views on baptism again subject to scrutiny, I take a moment to summarize what I’ve written on the subject. There is nothing new here. It is what I wrote in my dissertation, The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism , in my book, The Baptized Body…
As Stephen recounts the history of Israel to his persecutors, he refers in passing to several chronological details. Abraham’s descendants were slaves for 400 years (Acts 7:6), God appeared to Moses after 40 years of sojourn in Midian (7:30), and another 40 years passed with Israel in the wilderness (7:36).…
In a 2006 article in Studies in Philology , Sean Benson explores Shakespeare’s use of hawking imagery in romantic relations. Shakespeare “employs the gendered discourse of hawking language in order to make the interspecific leap from the falconer’s training of his female hawk to a husband’s training of his wife.…
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