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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Long before Greenblatt and the New Historicists, Shakespeare had been interpreted as a commentator on the religious or political circumstances of Elizabethan England. Among the interpretations of Hamlet summarized by Ernest Jones in his essay on Oedipus and Hamlet (first published in 1910!) are the notions that the play is…
Donald Macleod offers some intriguing insights in his IVP book on the Person of Christ: In many respects, Jesus’ human knowledge was like our own, as He learned about His Father through revelation: “his own capacity for such knowledge would differ significantly from that of ordinary men. But it would…
Donald Macleod offers some intriguing insights in his IVP book on the Person of Christ: In many respects, Jesus’ human knowledge was like our own, as He learned about His Father through revelation: “his own capacity for such knowledge would differ significantly from that of ordinary men. But it would…
Still more. ACT 1, SCENE 1 Several things about the first scene are worth examining. First, the play begins on a cold and bitter night on the ramparts of Elsinore. The darkness provides a fitting setting for the revelation that the world is out of joint, that something is rotten…
More notes toward a lecture. Shakespeare’s Hamlet exists in three significantly different forms. The earliest published text, the First Quarto or the “Bad Quarto,” appeared in 1603. Though recognizably Shakespeare’s play, it is different in many significant ways, and scholars have speculated that it is the product of one of…
Some notes toward a lecture on Hamlet. When Shakespeare put the story of Hamlet on stage in the early seventeenth century, the story was already an old one. Saxo Grammaticus, a 12th-century monk, told the story of Amleth, Prince of Jutland in his Historiae Danicae. According to Saxo’s version of…
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