Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Abbreviated Introduction to the Series Scripture is absolutely dripping with animal metaphors. Animal traits, characteristics, and appearances are attributed to God, Man, Angels, Nations, Armies. Since animals are the lowest creature in the three-tiered hierarchy, they are useful to metaphorically focus on a single aspect of God (bold like a…
Many years ago, while perusing Janice Anderson’s revised doctoral dissertation, Matthew’s Narrative Web: Over, and Over, and Over again , I was impressed by her attention to literary structures of repetition within and across Matthew’s Gospel. 1 Her research, in part, nudged me closer toward my present conviction that Matthew…
Abbreviated Introduction to the Series Scripture is absolutely dripping with animal metaphors. Animal traits, characteristics, and appearances are attributed to God, Man, Angels, Nations, Armies. Since animals are the lowest creature in the three-tiered hierarchy, they are useful to metaphorically focus on a single aspect of God (bold like a…
“Like a lily among the thorns, so is my love among the maidens… My beloved is mine and I am his; he pastures among the lilies.” Song 2:2, 16 In chapter two of the Song of Solomon, the Beloved compares his Love to a lily among thorns. The language of…
Introduction From the very beginning, angels and animals have played mediating roles between God and Man. Just as the World was made three-tiered (Heaven, Earth, Deep), so the creatures were made (Angels, Men, Animals). Before Christ came to build the permanent bridge across the chasm between God and Man, various…
Matthew 13, the third major discourse of the apostle’s gospel, is comprised almost entirely of parables. While it may seem that all the parables serve the same purpose in fulfilling the prophet Isaiah (Matthew 13:14), the parables found in verses 44–52, at the very least, function outside that purpose. This…
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Khaled Anatolios notes that Origen argued that “if God is eternally alighty, there must always be a creation over which God is sovereign.” Athanasius feels the force of the argument, but “transposes this line of reasoning to argue that if God is Creator, he must be eternally in possession of…
Those leading the assault on “classical theism” in recent decades has charged that the classical doctrine of God in Christian theology has reduced God to an impassive Stoic at best, and impersonal Substance at worst. Few can lay more direct claim to having founded “classical theism” than Athanasius, and yet…
In an extended discussion of the Christological import of Proverbs 8, Athanasius argues that the phrases “before the ages” and “before the mountains were set in place” refer to God’s preparation of the economy of grace: “Being himself good and the lover of humanity, he prepared beforehand the economy of…
Athanasius opposed to extrinicism in every form. Most obviously, he opposes the Arian effort to make the Son external to the Father and to the being of God. But that intrinsicism unfolds in an intrinsicist, christologically grounded soteriology. Why couldn’t God have sent a creature to save us? he presents…
In a proto-Wittgensteinian vein, Hamann wrote to Jacobi: “Metaphysics has its own school and court languages . . . and I am incapable of either understanding or making use of them. Hence I am close to suspecting that the whole of our philosophy consists more of language than of reason,…
In the Berlin-doesn’t-get-Hamann department, there’s also Berlin’s claim that for Hamann “existence logically precedes reason” and “there exists a pre-rational reality.” Not exactly. The world is there before we start reflecting on it; it’s got to be there for us to reflect on it. But for Hamann the real is…
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