Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
An addendum to the earlier post on Romans. In my first essay, I pointed out how the role of the sin of Joseph’s brothers in bringing about Joseph’s exaltation in Egypt, and the resulting salvation of the world from famine, might show us and explanation to some of the distinctive…
When Paul wrote to the Romans, he was obviously writing a missionary support letter of a sort. One can read Romans 1.15 and then jump into 15.23 (“[S]ince I no longer have any room. . . .) without losing virtually any coherence. Yet into this letter he “dropped,” as it…
The Westminster Confession says that each passage has one meaning , not many, and that gets picked up on by lots of people who are suspicious of and do not like typological readings of Scripture. I will defer to wiser and more learned heads than mine as to exactly what…
By arresting, torturing, and killing Jesus, the authorities thought that they were securing well being and peace again in their society by means of the tried and true method of a single-victim scapegoat. Everyone’s thirst for violence will be satisfied and we can get on with the business of everyday…
This is the second in a series of essays on "Continuing the Reformation." In his important though sadly unavailable book, Calvin's Doctrine of the Church (Brill, 1970), Benjamin Charles Milner argues persuasively that in Calvin's view God's perfect order for His creation, an order that was to grow and develop…
Trinity House Fellow James Jordan recently gave a series of lectures in London on how to read the Bible. They are available online at NorthLondonChurch.org .
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Laurence Michel, exploring the “Possibility of a Christian Tragedy,” suggests that the creation account of Genesis opens the possibility for a “tragic sense of life.” How? “To have a world imitative of the simple perfection of God one must have multiplicity and diversity of goods. Various evils and contraries will…
CS Lewis says in Pilgrim’s Regress : “Evil is fissiparous, and could never in a thousand eternities find any way to arrest its own reproduction. If it could, it could be no longer evil: for Form and Limit belong to the good.” But what then of a Good and Infinite…
In a chapter in Beyond Tragedy , Reinhold Niebuhr considers the relationship between Christianity and tragedy. He denies that Christianity is tragic: “The cross is not tragic but the resolution of tragedy.” In the course of his discussion he makes several intriguing points about the tragic outlook: 1) He highlights…
Simone Weil offered one of the most thorough-going Christian defenses of tragedy, though that defense comes at considerable cost to her orthodoxy. As Katherine Brueck points out in her study of Weil’s theory ( The Redemption of Tragedy ), Weil recognized that what was at stake in a discussion of…
Some more thoughts from Segal’s book: 1) He points out the optimism that gripped Athens in the Periclean period, an optimism about the ability of human LOGOS and NOMOS to stave off the savage potential of man’s PHUSIS. But that was short-lived: The Peloponnesian wars broke out, marked by several…
In his study of Sophocles, Tragedy and Civilization , Charles Segal points to several Greek terms that might be translated as “civilization” and that capture various aspects of civilized life: NOMOS = the established institutions, customs, and norms of a people POLITEIA = the form of government, especially the constitutional…
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