Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
For many people the date October 31 is significant not only for being the Eve of All Saints (All Hallows Eve, Halloween) but as the day in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenburg. These theses were a list of…
It has become routine in October for some Christian schools to send out letters warning parents about the evils of Halloween, and it has become equally routine for me to be asked questions about this matter. "Halloween" is simply a contraction for All Hallows’ Eve. The word "hallow" means "saint,"…
The following is an excerpt from Peter Leithart's forthcoming two-volume commentary on Revelation (T&T Clark). Y ou must prophesy again concerning many peoples and nations and tongues and kings,” a voice tells John (Rev. 10:11). Then someone gives him a “reed like a rod” and instructs him to measure (11:1).…
Josiah is an ideal Davidic king in many ways. He not only “did right,” but he “walked in the ways of his father David” and “did not turn aside to the right or to the left” (2 Chronicles 34:2). At the age of 16, he began to seek Yahweh, and…
One of the best discussions of Augustine’s views on time comes from Jeremy Begbie’s Theology, Music, and Time (ch. 3). Following Paul Ricoeur, Begbie claims that Augustine’s distentio “is conceived as the three-fold present, and the threefold present as distentio . The distentio consists in the non-coincidence of the mind’s…
This has always been the position of the Christian Church, and from an historical perspective the present situation in evangelicalism is appalling. The early liturgies of the Church, which are still used in Episcopal and Lutheran worship, are laced with psalm phrases. The early hymns, such as the Te Deum…
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Judith Gundry's contribution to The Child in the Bible examines the place of children in Mark's gospel, with particular focus on the episode of Jesus blessing the children. It's an illuminating essay. Mark includes no infancy narratives, but regularly shows Jesus exerting the power of the kingdom to rescue and…
In his Happiness Paradox , Ziyad Marar explores the sources of "justification." Humiliation is a uniquely human form of suffering. How do we deal with it? Our strategies for staving off humiliation are strategies of "justification." Freud offers some possibilities, He "enumerates a range of ways we avoid this kind…
Virginia Woolf, atheist though she was, couldn't avoid religious language when she spoke about her writing. Writing began from "a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words." It was her "shock-receiving capacity is…
Robert Brandom ( Tales of the Mighty Dead , 13-14) observes a continuity between Hegel and Kant: Both take concepts as "norms for judgment. They determine proprieties of application to particulars of terms that, because of the normative role they play in such judgments, express universals." But then Hegel adds…
Did the Council of Trent allow communion in both kinds, in bread and wine? The answer is complicated. Nathan Mitchell ( Oxford History of Christian Worship , 338-9) writes that "After intense behind-the-scenes negotiations, Pope Pius IV authorized communion in both species for German (16 April 1564). In effect, the…
Reviewing Carlos Eire's Reformations at First Things , Eamon Duffy claims that "Protestantism 'desacralized' the world by accepting an essentially binary division of reality into spirit and matter. That division was expressed in Reformation iconoclasm and the rejection of the notion that material objects—the bread and wine of the Mass,…
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