Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In the Bible, fatness is such a blessing, that it is especially hard to understand why wicked men are permitted to enjoy such a state. It requires a theodicy and faith in God. Thus: “For they have no pangs until death; their bodies are fat and sleek . They are…
[fve]http://vimeo.com/71901553[/fve]
The allusion to the Exodus story is contained in the first words of Deuteronomy 14:1 — “ye are the sons of Yahweh your God” — as well as in 14:2 in the use of the technical term translated “treasured possession,” “His own possession,” “peculiar people,” “precious people,” and so forth.…
I have argued that Deuteronomy 14:1-21 is an independent literary unit that applies the Third Word to the lives of Israelites from the time of Moses and Joshua. In this short pericope, Moses suggests broad and deep meaning by means of literary allusion to the stories of the creation and…
In his recently republished The New Creation , the late, delightful Herbert McCabe defends the priesthood of the plebs as roundly as anyone could want. Citing Hebrews, he claims that "there is an essential difference between the Christian community and the community of the Old Law, or any other religious…
Augustine famously prayed, “Our hearts our restless until they rest in You.” True indeed. Being creatures, we inherently sense our ontological poverty—our innate condition of dependence—and are compelled to find a sense of security. And it is also true—as Augustine’s own narrative painfully illustrates—that one of the things we most…
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Constantine says that some created things “possess wonderful properties, and the full apprehension of which is very difficult. Like hot springs. Or “the fruit of the olive-tree and the vine,” which “deserve especial notice; the one for its power of renovating and cheering the soul, the other because it ministers…
Thomas Madden offers a contrarian analysis of American and Roman empire in his recent book, Empires of Trust . Most empires in history, he says, “have sought to build their power in whatever way they can, making war on their neighbors when it seems advantageous and continuing to do so…
In another part of his oration, Constantine analyzes Virgil’s famed Fourth Eclogue, which Christians often took as a pagan prophecy of Christ. Constantine believes that it’s a deliberate prophecy, but one he deliberately obscured for fear of persecution: “these words are spoken plainly and at the same time darkly, by…
Constantine (of all people) provides a neat little analysis of the violent ontology of polytheism is his Good Friday oration, which Eusebius appended to the Life of Constantine : if the dominion of these [created] things, numberless as they are, were in the hands, not of one but of many,…
The First Things web site today posted some of my biblical-theological reflections on missions and culture: http://www.firstthings.com.
Of course Hebrews is written to Hebrews, not to Greeks. But there are suggestive echoes of the proem of the Odyssey in the opening chapters of the letter. The first words of the letter, polymeros kai polytropos , remind me of Homer’s first description of his hero - polymetis ,…
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