Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Creationism is debated widely in the US, especially when it comes to teaching creation as an alternative theory of origins in public schools. Every few months, there’s another poll showing that many Americans still believe Ussher’s claim that the world was created around 4000 BC, which always elicits a contemptuous…
Walker Percy died in 1990, but his six published novels and his collections of essays are more relevant than when he wrote them. Percy was an American Dostoevsky, and that was no accident. “The European novels,” he says in a 1974 interview, “are more philosophical, more novels of ideas.” Dostoevsky,…
The Spirit is God’s agent for renewing the creation, for restoring bonds between nations, for knitting together people into the body of Christ. The Spirit is the renewer of the world, and the bond of all relations. That means that if you want your family to be knit together, if…
In their basic physical sense , the verbs translated as "persecute" in the Bible mean “chase” or “pursue,” and that fits the context quite naturally. As Pharaoh “pursued” (LXX, dioko ; Heb. radaph ) Israel into the wilderness, for example, so the dragon chases the woman back to her place…
Seng-Kong Tan’s Fullness Received and Returned is a densely argued, thoroughly researched, contextually sensitive study of participation in the soteriology of Jonathan Edwards. Along the way, Tan deals with many of the central themes in Edwards’s theology. As with many recent studies of Edwards, Tan’s monograph demonstrates both Edwards’s creativity…
The title of James Joyce’s first novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man indicates that it is a bildungsroman , a story of formation that describes the formative experiences of a poet who aspires to artistic greatness. The education described is Joyce’s own. The novel recounts the failing…
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Khaled Anatolios notes that Origen argued that “if God is eternally alighty, there must always be a creation over which God is sovereign.” Athanasius feels the force of the argument, but “transposes this line of reasoning to argue that if God is Creator, he must be eternally in possession of…
Those leading the assault on “classical theism” in recent decades has charged that the classical doctrine of God in Christian theology has reduced God to an impassive Stoic at best, and impersonal Substance at worst. Few can lay more direct claim to having founded “classical theism” than Athanasius, and yet…
In an extended discussion of the Christological import of Proverbs 8, Athanasius argues that the phrases “before the ages” and “before the mountains were set in place” refer to God’s preparation of the economy of grace: “Being himself good and the lover of humanity, he prepared beforehand the economy of…
Athanasius opposed to extrinicism in every form. Most obviously, he opposes the Arian effort to make the Son external to the Father and to the being of God. But that intrinsicism unfolds in an intrinsicist, christologically grounded soteriology. Why couldn’t God have sent a creature to save us? he presents…
In a proto-Wittgensteinian vein, Hamann wrote to Jacobi: “Metaphysics has its own school and court languages . . . and I am incapable of either understanding or making use of them. Hence I am close to suspecting that the whole of our philosophy consists more of language than of reason,…
In the Berlin-doesn’t-get-Hamann department, there’s also Berlin’s claim that for Hamann “existence logically precedes reason” and “there exists a pre-rational reality.” Not exactly. The world is there before we start reflecting on it; it’s got to be there for us to reflect on it. But for Hamann the real is…
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