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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Anatolios makes the striking observation that Aristotle’s “Unmoved Mover” is even more transcendent than Plato’s form of the good. For Plato, being is self-communicative, and his most exalted realities (the form of the good, the forms) are participatable. Not Aristotle’s UM, which just thinks thinking in total self-absorption, while everything…
Henry Chadwick notes that the “alienation of Egypt and much of Syria from the Chalcedonian government was a serious political matter, and gravely weakened those key provinces before the Moslem invasions.”
Were the ecumenical councils infallible? Many in the early church clearly didn’t consider them so. The most vigorous, and vicious, arguments over Arius took place between Nicea and First Constantinople, and the Monophysite controversy continued for a century and more after Chalcedon had condemned Eutyches (as well as Nestorius). Nestorianism…
Henry Chadwick notes that Julian the Apostate tried to gain Jewish support by proposing to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem: “although Julian had little but contempt for Judaism, he was well aware that a proposal to restore sacrificies in a rebuilt temple at Jerusalem would touch the Christians at a…
Much of the theology instruction in the high middle ages took the form of commentary on established texts, most importantly the Four Books of the Sentences by Peter the Lombard. Lombard’s triumph, though, was contested. As Deeana Klepper points out in her book on Nicolas of Lyra, one of the…
Jean Blum characterized Hamann’s thought as follows: “Hamann’s thought is what those who do not normally think would think if they did think.” That gets it pretty well, as does Berlin’s comment that Hamann “was a major force in transforming the ideas which hitherto had lived in small, self-isolated religious…
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