Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
At the time I write this, many in the United States are under some kind of “lock-down” order. But, thanks to the internet, people are still able to communicate with each other. And people have differing opinions on which medical or scientific projection about our current pandemic is most likely…
So Jesus came again to Cana in Galilee, where he had made the water wine. And at Capernaum there was an official whose son was ill. When this man heard that Jesus had come from Judea to Galilee, he went to him and asked him to come down and heal…
Throughout the world, pastors and leaders are making sometimes excruciating decisions about whether or not to hold public worship services during the coronavirus pandemic and, if so, how. We at Theopolis encourage you to find creative, safe, reasonable, and submissive ways to meet in person with other believers. For many,…
An excerpt from The End of Israel: Jesus, Paul & AD70 by Michael Bull The Hebrew word olah, translated “whole burnt offering” literally means “go up.” The explanatory “translation” is helpful in its description of the offering but unfortunately for English readers it veils the symbolic meaning. As far as…
The # Coronavirus is trending more frequently than your favorite five celebrities put together. Our culture has exchanged TMZ stories for the primacy of the geeks who once made their living in the privacy of their laboratory. These are now our modern-day celebrities. It’s safe to say the experts surrounding…
In the name of Jesus Christ, our Savior, Lord, and Friend. Dear sister in Christ, Your baptism is firm and certain not because of anything you have done or the pastor who administered your baptism in Christ’s stead and command. Your baptism is firm and certain because of God and…
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Umberto Eco ( Limits of Interpretation ) criticizes Barthes’s notion that connotation occurs when “a sign function (Expression plus Content) becomes in turn the expression of a further content.” He argues that “in order to have a connotation, that is, a second meaning of a sign, the whole underlying first…
Isaiah 6:10 says that Isaiah’s ministry will make the hearts of Israel “fat” and their ears “heavy” ( kabad ). The phrasing is unique to Isaiah 6, but the combination of heavy and fat conjures up Eli, who also was going blind. Isaiah 6 is a new Samuel, and like…
MH Abrams notes that at the heart of Romanticism was a transfer of Christian concepts into a new, subjectivist, context: “Much of what distinguishes writers I call ‘Romantic’ derives from the fact that they undertook, whatever their religious creed or lack of creed, to save traditional concepts, schemes, and values…
Frank Lentricchia argues that there is “no unmediated historical knowledge,” and adds: “That is reserved for God, or for theorists like Hirsch who believe that objective knowledge can be acquired in a massive act of dispossessing ourselves of the only route to knowledge that we have: the historicized self. What…
Roger Lundin notes that modern interpretation often seeks an unmediated encounter with the text, and then adds: “Both Keith Thomas and Charles Taylor trace it, in part, to the Reformation’s anti-sacramental impulses, which fed into the desacralizing of nature that seventeenth-century science and commerce eagerly promoted. The process accelerated through…
For centuries, piano virtuosos had thrilled audiences with audacious performances of Liszt’s seventh Etude (in G minor, “Eroica”). Liszt scholars had written analyses of the music, and critics had compared various performances to one another and to what they believed was Liszt’s original intention for the music. An industrious Liszt…
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