Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
21. Under three things the earth quakes. And under four, it cannot bear up. 22. Under a slave when he becomes king, And a fool when he is satisfied with food, 23. Under an odious woman when she gets a husband, And a maidservant when she supplants her mistress. The…
We have looked at the prima facie evidence for a short chronology in Ezra-Nehemiah, a chronology that assumes that the Artaxerxes of Ezra 7ff. and Nehemiah is in fact Darius. This month we examine the argument against the short chronology. There is only one argument, and that is that the…
The Priestly Genealogy Jeshua the high priest, who returned with Zerubbabel, was not a young man at the time. We know this because his father, Jehozadak, was taken into captivity (1 Chron. 6:15). Thus was 50 years before the decree of Cyrus (2 Kings 25:18-22, by implication). Jehozadak’s father Seraiah,…
Thomas C. Oden, After Modernity . . . What? Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990. Reviewed by Rev. Jeffrey Meyers. Reading Oden’s After Modernity . . . What? was tonic. There were passages that launched me out of my chair with a hoot to pace the office floor — of course, the…
Matthew records that Jesus "withdrew" to Galilee to begin His public ministry there after He "heard that John had been delivered up" (Mt. 4:12). Matthew’s typically matter-of-fact style veils the truly remarkable character of Jesus’ withdrawal. Matthew has been presenting Jesus as the Messiah, the Seed of Abraham and Son…
John Brown called this one of the most difficult passages in the entire epistle to the Hebrews, and Hebrews is no easy book. Several questions confront us as we read and meditate on these verses. First, in what sense did the Old Testament saints described in verses 4-38 not receive…
Showing page 298 of 309
Showing page 2 of 43
Charles Taylor's account of our Secular Age has many virtues. (The following relies on Jamie Smith's summary of Taylor in How (Not) To Be Secular ; page numbers are from Taylor.) Taylor rejects “subtraction” theories of secularization, the notion that secular life was lurking beneath the sacred surface of ritual,…
Max Weber begins his lecture on “Science as a Vocation” by noting the “meaningless” of science, a product of the notion of scientific progress that guides scientific pursuits in the modern world. “E ach of us knows,” Weber writes, “that what he has accomplished will be antiquated in ten, twenty,…
James KA Smith's You Are What You Love is an accessible, penetrating treatment of the liturgical understanding of human existence, of discipleship, and culture that Smith has been developing in a number of his recent books. In this book, he focuses on the specifics of Christian liturgy as a “technology…
Revelation 21-22 gives a vision of an adorned city. Kings bring treasures into the city, but the city isn't just a container for art objects. The city is an art object. The entire civic order is an artistic creation. If the city is an art object, then all of the…
In his summary of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age , James KA Smith observes how apologetics accommodates to the social imaginary of the secular age. Apologetic responses to secularism have too often “conceded the game; that is, the responses to this diminishment of transcendence already accede to it in important…
The vision of the heavenly city at the end of Revelation contains a major oddity: The city descends twice . There are structural reasons for this. The first vision concludes one sequence in Revelation, and the second introduces a final vision. It is the same city, but the vision gives…
Showing page 291 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
