Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In a February blog post for the Theopolis Institute, Benoît Engel offers a thought-provoking challenge to the widely accepted five-discourse structure of Matthew’s Gospel, proposing a sixth discourse in Matthew 21:28–22:14 to reframe the Gospel’s chiastic center. As someone deeply invested in Matthew’s literary design—explored in my book Reading Matthew,…
Avoid foolish disputes, genealogies, contentions, and strivings about the law, for they are unprofitable and useless. Titus 3:9 Out of a deep love and care for the church, Paul tells Titus and those in the church to avoid four specific things: foolish disputes, genealogies, contentions, and strivings about the law.…
Theopolis publishes many polemics, especially on the Sacraments. This piece does not necessarily reflect the views of Theopolis, her board, or her editors. -JW Whoever touches the dead body of any person shall be unclean seven days.He shall cleanse himself with the water on the third day and on the…
There is in the United States and the Western World some sort of religious revival occurring. Gen Z men—males born between ca 1997 and 2012—are flooding back in to churches. USA Today noted that Gen Z men—and to a lesser degree women—attending churches more than their millennial predecessors and they…
The primary task of many Biblical scholars (as they see it) is to explain how and why the Biblical text acquired its final form—i.e., what source material it used, how that material was expanded/redacted, who expanded/redacted it, why they did so, what the weather was like at the time, etc.…
Galatians 5:5-15 For through the Spirit, by faith, we ourselves eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love. You were running well. Who hindered you from obeying the truth? This persuasion is not from…
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In the first part of his article “Soul of Reciprocity,” Milbank contrasts Cartesian generosity with Christian: “if the cogito is the donum , it is an impoverished donum . Generosity, in Descartes, begins as generosity towards oneself, or rather, as an expansive willing, that already is, auto-effectively, generosity. It is…
Maarten Wisse scores some points against Trinitarian “participationist” ontology in his 2011 Trinitarian Theology beyond Participation: Augustine’s De Trinitate and Contemporary Theology (T&T Clark Studies in Systematic Theology) . But there are irritations. Early on, he points out that participationist theologies attempt to redress the modern disenchantment of the world.…
Vickers ( Invocation and Assent: The Making and the Remaking of Trinitarian Theology ) gives a thorough and challenging account of the collapse of Trinitarian theology in seventeenth-century English Protestantism. He thinks that the collapse can be traced to three roots: The appeal to Scripture as the rule of faith;…
Building on the work of Robert Jenson and especially JND Kelly, Jason Vickers argues in Invocation and Assent: The Making and the Remaking of Trinitarian Theology that the proto-creedal affirmations of Trinitarian theology that are found in the various “rules of faith” specifically aim to undergird confidence in the efficacy…
“Despite the contemporary belief that ‘the normal sacrificial cult is a cult without revelation or epiphany,’” writes Kimberley Patton in her Religion of the Gods: Ritual, Paradox, and Reflexivity , “primary evidence suggests that the Greeks believed that the gods both attended and responded to sacrifice. In Book 12 of…
The cultural history of night is the subject of two recent books. Roger Ekirch’s At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past is a broad history of the uses and symbolism of night prior to the invention of electric lighting. One of his most fascinating discoveries was the habit of segmented…
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