Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Christmas is a joyful season, but for many it turns into something else. Instead of joy, it is full of disappointment and unhappiness. Instead of an occasion for family fellowship, it becomes an opportunity for opening old wounds, reigniting old arguments, giving new life to rancor that should have died…
The Temple of Time The “covenant-literary matrix” of the Bible is not a pattern imposed upon the text, but the internal logic of its arrangement. This fundamental structure, functioning at multiple levels simultaneously, is a ceaseless reiteration of God’s primary theme. It is an algorithm forged in the furnace of…
In the four hundred and eightieth year after the Exodus, Solomon began to build the temple of the Lord in Jerusalem. [1] That the author of Kings should date the start of the building of the temple from the Exodus is noteworthy. In Exodus 15:17, in Moses’ song following the…
Philip Schaff, a German Reformed theologian, states in The Principle of Protestantism that the material principle of Protestantism is “the doctrine of the justification of the sinner before God by the merit of Christ alone through faith.” This is the core message of the Church which leads “to the abandonment…
“Religion” is an attempt to create or build a tower with a top, or to build a temple that is self-contained. The story of The Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 is the story of mankind’s attempt to create a world that is self-contained and does not need God. All…
In the first essay in this series, I presented a case for dating Matthew before AD 70, contrary to the present scholarly consensus. In this essay, I intend to present cultural, personal, ecclesiological, and theological arguments for a very early date for Matthew. [1] The cultural argument concerns literacy in…
Showing page 121 of 309
Showing page 2 of 43
Judith Gundry's contribution to The Child in the Bible examines the place of children in Mark's gospel, with particular focus on the episode of Jesus blessing the children. It's an illuminating essay. Mark includes no infancy narratives, but regularly shows Jesus exerting the power of the kingdom to rescue and…
In his Happiness Paradox , Ziyad Marar explores the sources of "justification." Humiliation is a uniquely human form of suffering. How do we deal with it? Our strategies for staving off humiliation are strategies of "justification." Freud offers some possibilities, He "enumerates a range of ways we avoid this kind…
Virginia Woolf, atheist though she was, couldn't avoid religious language when she spoke about her writing. Writing began from "a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words." It was her "shock-receiving capacity is…
Robert Brandom ( Tales of the Mighty Dead , 13-14) observes a continuity between Hegel and Kant: Both take concepts as "norms for judgment. They determine proprieties of application to particulars of terms that, because of the normative role they play in such judgments, express universals." But then Hegel adds…
Did the Council of Trent allow communion in both kinds, in bread and wine? The answer is complicated. Nathan Mitchell ( Oxford History of Christian Worship , 338-9) writes that "After intense behind-the-scenes negotiations, Pope Pius IV authorized communion in both species for German (16 April 1564). In effect, the…
Reviewing Carlos Eire's Reformations at First Things , Eamon Duffy claims that "Protestantism 'desacralized' the world by accepting an essentially binary division of reality into spirit and matter. That division was expressed in Reformation iconoclasm and the rejection of the notion that material objects—the bread and wine of the Mass,…
Showing page 123 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
