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…
Showing page 22 of 309
Showing page 2 of 43
The typological pattern of Ruth is: Naomi, the Jewish widow, is bereft; the Gentile daughter Ruth joins her; Naomi gets a savior when Boaz attaches himself to Ruth . That is, the pattern is not “Savior, then incorporation of Gentiles” but “incorporation of Gentiles, then Savior.” In the fulfillment, it’s…
I’ve been listening all day to piano and orchestral music from several Chinese composers: Shande Ding, Yah-jun Hua, Wen-cheng Lu, Guang Ren, Bi-guang Tang, Lishan Wang, Jianer Zhu. They combine traditional Chinese music with Western forms, and are far more accessible than many contemporary Western composers. They are not naive…
Milbank finds Augustine’s theory of signs unsatisfactory, since signs are there only to “recall res ” and “finally to recall spiritual res in the soul, where Christ speaks, wordlessly.” At the same time, he finds a “counter-failing tendency” in Augustine’s notion of the interior word, since that “construes thought as…
Augustine is charged with being proto-Cartesian when he locates the imago Dei in the mind or soul. Maybe, but we need to ask what he says about that imago . Among other things, he sees the soul’s capacity to beget an inner word that is both different from and yet…
John 6:53: Jesus therefore said to them, Truly, Truly I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves. He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him…
Docetism can take subtle forms. We can affirm that Jesus was truly human, with human hands and human eyes and human feet and human hair. But we fall into docetism if we fail to see how specific Jesus’ humanity is. The Son became human, but we need to be more…
Showing page 1598 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
