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…
Showing page 170 of 309
Showing page 2 of 43
Many writers of the English Enlightenment attempted to formulate an original monotheistic “natural religion” that could be contrasted with the “positive religion” of Christianity. Priests suppressed the true natural religion that was maintained in secret by philosophers until they could teach it openly. The form of this historical account is…
In 1517, Ulrich von Hutton published a German translation of Lorenzo Valla’s demonstration that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery. Luther read it early and said in a 1520 letter, “Good heavens! what darkness and wickedness is at Rome. I am in such a fit that I scarcely doubt…
What makes the Spirit Holy? Holy in Scripture means “claimed by indwelling glory.” The tabernacle is consecrated as holy space by the indwelling glory of Yahweh. Saints are those claimed by the indwelling of the Spirit. The Spirit is Holy because the Spirit is claimed, by Father and Son. He…
The Donation of Constantine includes a reference to the legend that Constantine was cured of leprosy by Pope Sylvester sometime in the 310s, and then baptized. Constantine is recorded as saying “on the first day after receiving the mystery of the holy baptism, and after the cure of my body…
Emery says that for Aquinas the diversity of creation is founded in the personal plurality of the divine relations: “One cannot emphasize more forcefully the positive value of the multiplicity of creature; Saint Thomas does not conceive of plurality as a decline from unity, but to the contrary, as a…
Thomas’ Trinitarian account of creation has not only a Christological but a pneumatological dimension, Emery argues. Thomas’ Augustinian pneumatology is rooted in his recognition that within the “God who loves himself,” there is a God who is loved and a love that is God. Especially in his later work, he…
Showing page 1472 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
