Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Place names become fraught with meaning by association with people and events. The name “Wittenberg” calls to mind Luther and the Reformation for Protestants and Catholics alike. Geneva has a wider range of associations, but the Reformation Wall, with its four main statues of William Farel, John Calvin, Theodore Beza,…
“…a mystery without a solution, a horror story without savagery, a nightmare in which all the watches stop at noonday…” The Bestial Gardens of Men Then they will say to the mountains, “Fall on us!” and to the hills, “Cover us!” (Luke 23:30) The following lines by Edgar Allan Poe,…
2 Samuel 11-12, which record David’s sin with Bathsheba and its aftermath, is structured chiastically: This arrangement highlights several things about the episode. It reinforces what is obvious from even a casual reading, that the transition in the story occurs with Nathan’s confrontation of David’s sin and David’s confession. Up…
Medieval bestiaries are packed with quaintly inaccurate information about animals, birds, and other created things. Foxes and snakes are devilish critters; stags, pelicans and elephants are Christlike in their various ways. Of course, the medievals picked this up from the Bible, where bestiary observations are fairly common. “Go to the…
What do Reformational Catholicism and craft beer have in common? The question seems to beg for a punchline. Better yet, it would be pretty good clickbait for an article on Katharina von Bora’s “spirited” contribution that helped spark the Protestant Reformation. Well, this is no joke and I am certainly…
Suffering Defined Suffering happens. We witness it all around us and experience it in our lives. It often comes from forces beyond our control. Suffering is inscrutable; it strikes unexpectedly, on a bright summer day or a cold winter night. We lament and are bewildered by suffering. But we are…
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Knight criticizes Frederick Beiser’s treatment of rationality in the early English Enlightenment because he “does not relate ‘reason’ to reasoning together, converse, public talk, and the skills of the development of public talk. Reason therefore for him never appears as faith doing what it must do to remain faithful -…
Knight writes at the end of a couple of chapters exploring Israel’s calling and the role of her cult in that calling: “I have presented my atonement theory as a general anthopological theory. I have developed a Christology that serves as a general anthropology. I am not setting out first…
In making a structural point about Matthew’s references to “worship” of Jesus last week, I skimmed a bit too lightly over the details. Reader Ronald Man caught me, and offered these comments: There is no indication that the Magi (or Herod) recognized Jesus’ deity; rather it is clearly stated that…
One of the intriguing threads in Knight is his rehabilitation of biology within theology - or, more specifically, the inclusion of “blood and seed, of sonship and messiah, of holiness and purity” within pneumatology. Contesting the common opposition of fictive and biological kinship, he says that “we should understand ‘fictive’…
Knight again: “autonomous exegesis that does not stay in conversation with doctrine and philosophy cannot read Israel’s Scriptures as a political-cosmological world-claim. Without learning from doctrine and political philosophy, would-be exegetes of the Bible are unlikely to understand Israel’s cosmology as a public claim to commandeer, transform, and reemploy the…
Knight has a lot of intriguing things to say about Israel and the nations, among them: “As Israel suffers the gentile onslaughts, Israel is half-persuaded that it has to compete with the Gentiles as an equal rather than as their lord; Israel has to fight them as thought it were…
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