Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Along His journey to Jerusalem, Jesus stops frequently to have meals, three times with Pharisees (7:37-50; 11:37-54; 14:1-35). Meals were central to Jesus’ ministry. He comes “eating and drinking” (Luke 7:34). While His meals are not just for refreshment, they are opportunities for teaching the protocols of the kingdom. Meals…
Time as a realm of participation can be difficult for us imaginatively to grasp. While music is a profoundly temporal art, exploring the medium of time like no other, most of our temporal experience seems decidedly unmusical in character, disjointed and unorchestrated. The form in which we naturally discover time…
John devotes much attention to Jesus’ burial clothes. He tells us that Nicodemus brought about a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes to spice Jesus body, and that He was bound in linen wrappings. We find out that His body and His head were wrapped separately. (John 19:39-40; 20:6-7). When…
Thinking about time in terms of music also helps us to appreciate its unity and inner relations. Henri Bergson observes our cultural habit of dividing time into discrete moments, and conceiving of these as if akin to objects in a spatial succession. [1] Against such a notion, Bergson argues for…
As we attend to these and other aspects of music’s temporality, Begbie suggests, we will find means by which to resist some of our habitual modern ways of conceptualizing time, most especially our tendency to conceive of time as if it were a homogeneous set of technologically quantifiable units laid…
The Hidden Dimension In many fields of scientific study, the apparent complications and contradictions are dispelled once the internal logic is perceived. Biblical hermeneutics is no different, since the author of Creation is the Author of the Word. The Bible’s literary labyrinth radiates organically from an algorithm so simple it…
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What Esther Meeks calls the "defective epistemic default" of modernity infects and paralyzes biblical interpretation. In this default, knowledge is defined as information. This can only produce puzzlement about the details of the Bible. They aren't symbols; they aren't clues; they text isn't pregnant with meaning. The details are there…
Jesus turned water to wine at the wedding to Cana. It's the first sign, John tells us (John 2:11). It's an epiphany of the Word made flesh. Of what is it a sign? The wedding takes place on the "third day" (2:1), which is the seventh day in the sequence…
For our culture, real knowledge is the bits of data we accumulate by observation and experiment to store in our brains. Once harvested, knowledge is an impersonal and atemporal heap of information. In the Bible, knowing isn’t so simple. The Bible forces us to ask, When? How? and Who? God…
Adults in the Room , Yanis Varoufakis's account of his brief time as the finance minister of Greece, has all qualities of a tragedy. It is, Varoufakis writes, "the story of what happens when human beings find themselves at the mercy of cruel circumstances that have been generated by an…
A couple of excellent passages from Paul Tyson's De-Fragmenting Modernity . First, this on how modernity's "immanent frame" (Charles Taylor) not only prevents governments from addressing social problems, but actually creates conditions that cultivate the problem in the first place (2-3): "At a policy level, we are more or less…
Yahweh speaks the Ten Words to his son, Israel . The Words are ultimately pointing to the Son, who takes flesh to become true Israel. The Ten Words speak of Jesus, and Jesus is the final interpretation of their demands. "Honor your father and your mother," the Lord says, and…
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