Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Figure: Literary structure of the Garden narrative The Garden narrative describes God forming the adam , resting him in his presence, then provisioning for his appetites of food, vocation, and mate. It continues to describe a snake, the introduction of death, and humanity's expulsion from the garden. The pages of…
I’ve spent the last few years studying the theology of St. Irenaeus (d. circ. 200ad). In particular, I’ve been gripped by the way that Irenaeus consistently resisted the anti-body emphasis that emerged in later Christian theology. His eschatology is remarkably focused on the resurrection of the body, and the renewal…
Details of Jesus in Exodus 1:22-2:25 Although there are a great many Christ-types in the Old Testament, it is hard to overplay the obviousness of some that seem to necessarily rise to the top before others. One of these is Isaac, with his near sacrifice by his own father after…
What can we say about Cain's wicked sanctuary-city of Enoch? First that it was built with a brother's blood as its cornerstone. The Church is also built such, for Jesus was the younger brother of the whole Adamic race, slain by that company of older brothers because they hated Him.…
In Genesis 2:9 the ground brought forth trees good for food, delightful to view, and in two cases, life-giving or rule-bestowing. Adam, made of the ground (2:7), would by implication bring forth new trees, and thus trees and plants are among the symbols for human beings throughout the Bible. The…
One of the must fundamental teachings of the Bible and of the Christian religion is that man does not have life in himself. Man must get life from outside of himself, in order to maintain his life. The way this is done is through eating and drinking. Apart from life,…
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A TLS reviewer of Will Self’s recent Liver compares Self’s work with that of the late David Foster Wallace: “He shared with Self a willingness to experiment with genre, pastische and several other acutely artificial literary devices, as well as a sense of the grotesque, a liking for long words…
With his rock star style and his intoxicating brew of high and pop culture, Zizek seems to be a paradigmatic pomo. Not so, says Terry Eagleton: “If he steals some of the postmodernists’ clothes, he has little but contempt for their multiculturalism, anti-universalism, theoretical dandyism and modist obsession with culture.…
In a largely negative review of John and Carol Garrard’s Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent ( TNR , December 31), Leon Aron notes the importance of Orthodoxy in contemporary Russian politics: “Orthodoxy is now all the rage among the Russian elite. The formerly godless KGB and Komsomol graduates who rule the country…
Since the patristic period, the parable of the laborers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16) has been detached from its context and understood as a parable about Jews and Gentiles (Irenaeus) or about early and late conversion (Origen). Those are, I think, valid uses or applications of the parable, but the…
Several times in her Sacred Power, Sacred Space (Oxford), Jeanne Halgren Kilde makes odd comments about the gnostic emphasis on Jesus’ humanity. Like this: “Although Gnostics had struggled mightily to emphasize Jesus’ humanity, the concept of the holy Trinity, and with it the divinity of Christ, became orthodox. Yet the…
Now here’s a wonder. In his recent The Contested Public Square (IVP), Greg Forster says that in the early centuries the church developed “a thoroughly - and irreversibly - apolitical understanding of its own existence and mission.” Irreversible, that is, until it was reversed. Less that forty pages later, Forster…
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