Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Evangelistic Message to the Uninformed: 1 Timothy 3.14-16 Even though this is written as a sermon for delivery, and even though it was preached in a homiletics class, I decided I can’t post it as a sermon because it was not truly preached at a place where nonchristians wanted to…
If we only read the Gospels of Mark and Luke, we might get the impression that Jesus’ ascension was on resurrection Sunday. Matthew speaks of going to Galilee but he does not put things into a clear time frame. John shows us that Jesus appeared to the disciples eight days…
The most cursory glance at the history of Western literature reveals that it has been deeply influenced by the Bible. Some of the greatest classics of Western literature draw their plots, characters, and ideas largely from Scripture; Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost are two of the most notable…
Few themes emerge as profoundly and persistently in the streams of biblical narrative as the conflict between light and darkness, and the juxtaposition of humanity with monstrosity. These themes not only weave through the fabric of Scripture, emerging in stories from Genesis to Revelation, but also stitch together the human…
In John Wenham’s work, Easter Enigma , he devotes an entire chapter to Mary Magdalene, which is rephrased and summarized here. 1 One of the interesting things that Wenham said was that Mary Magdalene was the second “most favored woman in the Bible.” 2 He adds, “Yet apart from a…
God made man to live in a larger relational context, and even in high rebellion, man cannot escape his created nature. Instead, that nature takes revenge on rebellious man. Autonomous and alone, the self craves absolution but recognizes no authority that might give it; it thirsts for glory but rejects…
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The premise of Bonaventure’s “reduction of arts to theology” is that all knowledge, skill, perception is about light. Good and perfect gifts come down from the Father of Lights, James says, and Bonaventure sees that light refracted into four types of light. Some are obvious: the inner light of reason…
God alone, Augustine says, can act directly on souls. We cannot, but that doesn’t mean we can’t act on other souls. In Augustine’s anthropology, this is done through the body, by “signals conveyed by the physical body.” Such physical signs might be gestures, facial expressions, or “conventional indications such as…
Augustine, of course, says that pride is the beginning of revolt and sin. A prideful soul is one that refuses to recognize that “the whole quality of the soul’s existence is from God” and therefore that it is “enlivened in mental activity and in self-consciousness by God’s presence.” God, Augustine…
In his early treatise de musica , Augustine arranges everything into a hierarchy: God and other immutable objects above; human souls between; bodies and other carnal things below. It’s a Neoplatonic and hardly Christian notion. But embedded within that Augustine gets at something more sound. “Delight or enjoyment sets the…
Washington, Augustus on a prancing horse, sword pointing toward sunset. Over the pond, fringed with ice, droop the weeping willows. And what I miss most in the pine-blanketed West: leafless trees in cold sunshine.
In expounding on the coherence of Trinitarian theology with contemporary physics, Polkinghorne notes htat “it is striking that so methodologically reductionist a subject as physics has pointed us in this relational and holistic direction. This tendency is surely reinforced by chaos theory’s discovery that at the macroscopic level of physical…
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