Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
1. Come, Ye Thankful People, Come. This hymn by Henry Alford is found in many hymnals, including Cantus Christi . Yet, the last stanza radically contradicts the theological perspective of the historic faith and of the editors of this hymnal. It is a witness to how we tend to bounce…
This series of post were originally published at the Biblical Horizons blog. The entire paper can be downloaded HERE . 7. The Literary Shape of the Covenant As we have seen, there is a succession of covenants in the Bible, each more glorious than the previous, each absorbing and transfiguring…
This series of post were originally published at the Biblical Horizons blog. The entire paper can be downloaded HERE . 6. Covenant Phases in the Bible Thus far we have spoken of only three phases in the history of the one covenant. We must now divide the third phase into…
This series of post were originally published at the Biblical Horizons blog. The entire paper can be downloaded HERE . 5. Priest, King, and Prophet We can begin with the phrase “prophet, priest, and king.” This is the order normally heard from preachers and theologians. But it is not really…
This is a fine hymn by John Mason Neale, based on an ancient Greek church hymn. The opening question is particularly powerful: “Christian, dost thou see them on the holy ground, how the powers of darkness compass thee around?” Yes, the devil strikes in the very church and her worship…
This syrupy piece of marijuana-haze hymnody is found in the hymnals of churches that have substituted sentiment for orthodoxy and worship. Hence you don’t find it in older Presbyterian hymnals, but in the Trinity Hymnal. Nor do you find it in Episcopal and Lutheran hymnals until very recently in some…
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According to Michael Nerlich ( Ideology of Adventure ), “all figures of the Greek and Latin novels of adventure are ‘involuntary’ adventurers.” Mikhail Bakhtin too ( Dialogic Imagination ) emphasizes that in earlier adventures “an individual can be nothing other than completely passive, completely unchanging” and function as “merely the…
Winder McConnell ( Nibelungenleid , 98-99) sketches the changing uses of the epic in the mid-20 th century: “During the Weimar Republic, the themes and motifs of the Nibelungenlied had been employed by authors of antirepublican persuasion to express optimism for Germany’s future, but poets and dramatists sympathetic to the…
In an essay in A Companion to Gottfried of Strassburg's Tristan , Ulrich Muller argues that “In Tristan und Isolde Wagner radically transformed the meaning and message of Gottfried’s romance, just as he had in Parsifal. As cast by Gottfried (and in all medieval versions), the lovers and their love…
Andreas Capellanus literally wrote the book on the Art of Courtly Love , but the concluding Book 3 suggests that the book was a cautionary tale throughout. Capellanus closes the treatise with an exhortation to Walter, the man to whom the book is addressed to abstain from the desires of…
Even today, when historians have abandoned the idea, many regard the Middle Ages as a time dark and ignorant, the huddled masses in shadows until the burst of light that came with the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment. For centuries, it is often thought, medieval thinkers knew little of the…
Allegorization was one of the techniques medieval used, adapted from ancient writers, to incorporate pagan writing in a biblical framework. As Ernst Curtius ( European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages ) writes, “the Middle Ages subjected profane writers to allegorical interpretation exactly as it did the Bible, and .…
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