Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Leo the Great's second sermon on the Ascension, Sermon 74 . I. The mystery of our salvation, dearly-beloved, which the Creator of the universe valued at the price of His blood, has now been carried out under conditions of humiliation from the day of His bodily birth to the end…
Life, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy says, is suffering, battle, pain, shock, failure, elation. Human beings are always torn, always riven. Much of human life, individually and collectively, is an effort to deal with suffering and death. By being the first Man, Jesus establishes the possibility of a different stance toward suffering and…
Is Christian baptism given to believers only or to believers and their children? That’s the question that must be answered—but only if you’re Baptist or Presbyterian. That’s how the question is framed between these two denominations in this dispute, and it’s along these lines the debate unfolds as each side…
Again and again the liturgy of St Chrysostom calls God a lover of mankind. He is Philanthropolos Theos (man-loving God), Kurios Philanthropolos (man-loving Lord), Philopsychos (lover of the soul). Philanthropy wasn’t a Christian invention. Roman benefactors gave benefits to subordinates. What was new was the shape of philanthropy, for the…
Perhaps the most fearful of all possibilities in the world is the possibility of betrayal on the part of someone who is in a “position of trust.” This, unfortunately, is the first block in what ought to be the foundation of every marriage in the world. Every woman has a…
It seems that denominationalism has had its day. A 2009 Barna survey found that denominational commitments have gone squishy in mainline Protestant churches, and Evangelicals don’t fare much better than the rest. After a similar survey, Ron Sellers of Ellison Research said that Protestants are as “loyal to their denominations…
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According to the Muslim commentator Ibn Abbas, “after the fall, Adam and Eve fasted for forty days and Adam abstained from having sex with Eve for a hundred years.”
George Williamson argues in Longing for Myth in Germany (Chicago, 2004) that the search for a “new mythology” developed from “the postrevolutionary experience of historical rupture and religious crisis.” Nationalist writers gave a particular spin to this by calling for a “German mythology.” Originally, in the early German romantics, the…
It is widely argued today that the early German romantic movement anticipates postmodernism; the early romantics were postmoderns before their time. Frederick Beiser differs, and notes three critical differences between German romanticism and the mainstream of postmodern philosophy. First, the early romantics were Platonists “in their belief in a single…
German idealism is often seen as the completion of the subjectivization of knowledge and reality begun by Descartes. Not so, says Frederick Beiser in his massive 2002 history of German idealism (Harvard): “In fundamental respects it is more accurate to say the exact opposite: that the development of German idealism…
Jean-Luc Marion challenges the Cartesian cogito by stressing the primacy of the erotic. According to Descartes’s formula ( Ego sum res cogitans ), “it follows by omission that I am no longer supposed to love, nor to hate; or better: I am of such a sort that I have neither…
Barth argues that 18th-century rational theology was rooted in prior commitments to peaceable citizenship and morality. The dynamic goes something like this: Christianity is interpreted pragmatically - it’s about the transformation of human life; but it doesn’t work - human life isn’t transformed; there must therefore be something wrong with…
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