Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
"The faithful use of sacraments, and indeed a fully sacramental view of creation, is vital to the life of the Church. Baptism and the Lord's Supper are rites that directly shape the community and the Body, because they were given by God for that express purpose. A deficient practice of…
Weightlessness is fun. At the beginning of Gravity (2013) , we can see one astronaut dancing the Macarena and another one playing with his jetpack. They like it out there in the space. Apart from zero-gravity they can enjoy beautiful views, and even the silence is likable, although Matt Kowalski…
I recently went to a lunch that is more or less quarterly. About a dozen of us go. It is a lunch held in honor of a retired professor of religion and philosophy. I have been one of his acquaintances for more than 40 years. In his tenure as professor,…
Why Theopolis? Don't we already have seminaries and Bible colleges and other institutions for theological education? Why do we need another one? I get this question now and again. I ask myself this question even more often. What follows is a partial answer. Back in the 1990s, seminaries seemed to…
I think the logic of the Lutheran Reformation can be summarized in one sentence, attributed to Luther himself: "God does not need your good works, but your neighbor does." The first half of that statement is justification by faith . God doesn't need our works to satisfy his justice or…
If you are looking to start a fight with Christians, there is hardly a better subject to do so than the arts. Music, movies, paintings, and literature have provided no small battlegrounds for Christians to war. We are emotionally invested in the arts. A song, a book, or a film…
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Archaeologists once discovered a small fragment of Greek text in the Egyptian desert. The name “Paul” appeared at the beginning of the text, and one of the words contained what looked like the first letters of the word “apostle.” Otherwise, the text did not conform to any known texts from…
Gadamer points out that the Enlightenment operated on “an unshakable premise: the scheme of the conquest of mythos by logos.” For the Enlightenment, this represented a progress. Romanticism assumed the same development, but considered it a tragic lost. Romantics found “that olden times - the world of myth, unreflective life,…
Eugene Peterson writes that the Sabbath “erects a weekly bastion against the commodification of time, against reducing time to money, reducing time to what we can get out of it, against leaving no time for God or beauty or anything that cannot be used or purchased. It is a defense…
In an essay on M. H. Abrams’s Natural Supernaturalism , Wayne Booth praises the style of the book, but more: “I must emphasize that I am not simply praising Abrams’ style. i am making what I take to be a much more risky claim: that a style that is good…
Gracia argues: “Consider a text of a message sent by a particular historical figure to another, and which is being examined by a historian. The historian wishes to determine exactly what the person who sent the message meant, and what the person who received the message understood by it, so…
Gracia nicely illustrates how meaning can go beyond authorial intention with a reference to games: “one of the plays makes a move the significance of which he does not quite grasp. For the player is the author of the move, and wins or loses accordingly, by virtue of the fact…
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