Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Every advent of new media creates the justifiable reaction from some that the necessarily accompanied amputation may not be worth the extension made possible by the new tools. This is not unique to the Digital Age. Lamoignon Malesherbes, the French politician who was counsel for the defense of Louis XVI,…
A response to Gage Crowder's " The Hole in our Hope ?" Already, the first pages of the Bible promise a bright future. The story starts with the creation of heaven and earth, where heaven is perfect, but the earth is in a state of formless emptiness. Yet, God takes…
A rejoinder to Bubu Jarmulak's essay, " Embrace Pessimism ." Whereas calumnious critiques are reflections of more on the critic than the work criticized, good critiques are always opportunities for reassessment and improvement if they are received as such . Since its renaissance, the biblical doctrine of postmillennialism—or “optimistic eschatology,”…
Several decades ago, a pastor (and friend) mentioned in passing at one of our regular breakfasts together that he wasn’t satisfied with the usual reading of Jesus’s prayer in Gethsemane, the usual reading being that Jesus asked the Father to avoid the Cross at Gethsemane. We turned to the passage,…
On May 21, 1604, the cathedral of Toledo in Spain held job interviews for the post of choirmaster, the head of music at the church. The position had been vacated when the previous occupant, Alonso Lobo, was poached by the nearby cathedral of Seville, and Toledo needed a replacement who…
Imagine — counterfactually: on the night he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus held up an empty hand and said, ‘This is the blood of the covenant poured out for you. Drink of it.’ But there was no cup, no wine, nothing. If there’s no sign of the covenant, is there…
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David Virtue has a long, long list of non-participants at Lambeth, many representing the most vibrant portions of the Anglican communion. He estimates that 450-500 Anglican bishops are missing.
Freundlieb offers several criticisms of Saussure’s notion that language is purely differential. First, “If the meaning of a term could not be specified positively but only in relation to (all the?) other terms in the lexicon, no one could ever learn the vocabulary of a language, except in one stroke…
In an article in Poetics Today , Dieter Freundlieb notes that “Saussure argues that ‘in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that…
At least Thiselton gets James Barr right. Asked about the meaning of ekklesia in the New Testament, “we might say (a) ‘the Church is the Body of Christ’ (b) ‘the Church is the first installment of the Kingdom of God’ (c) ‘the Church is the Bride of Christ, and other…
Much biblical interpretation today is minimalist. Deliberately so. Anthony Thiselton approvingly quotes this from Eugene Nida: “The correct meaning of any term is that which contributes least to the total context.” Thiselton expounds: “we might define the semantic values of ‘green’ in several ways: as a colour, as meaning inexperienced,…
Context determines the meaning of a word, right? But “context” refers, in the first instance, to other words. But their meaning must also be determined by context? When you take all the words away, what’s left of the “context” that’s supposed to determine the word’s meaning? Mustn’t individual words and…
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