Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
That there is something wrong with the world is obvious. It does not take much time or brilliance to notice it. Once we get the feeling that we could imagine a better world, we are tempted to fix it or, if we cannot, to escape it. For both the world-fixers…
“Our Father in heaven,” what is man that we should be called your sons and daughters, beloved children of God Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, Yahweh of Hosts, the Ancient of Days. You are not a father preoccupied with work or engrossed in your smartphone; you are a present…
The Son of God took on human flesh and entered into the sin and suffering of our world. His life and teaching and suffering from His conception to His suffering on the cross teaches us a lot about how the good news enters into the world. Recently, I was teaching…
There is an unspoken rule about typology that permeates Evangelical thinking. It goes something like this: “If the New Testament authors don’t use an Old Testament character as a type, we don’t either.” There is a soundness in this reasoning, at least in a preliminary sense. There is no better…
In The world of Silence, Max Picard writes, “There does not seem to be any space left where there could possibly have been anything but noise. We take it for granted much as we take the air itself for granted. Everything begins and ends with noise.” Is it fair to…
God is Not There God is not in the book of Esther. Do a word search and you will get 0 results. Also try Lord, Yahweh, Prayer, Temple, or Sacrifice. Even names with God’s name in them, like Elijah, Jeremiah, or Daniel are missing. The fool says in his heart,…
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More evidence of “poesis” in Renaissance notions of human nature and “self-fashioning.” The first quotation is from Pico, and is drawn from Lewis’s English Literature in the Sixteenth Century : God’s words to Adam at creation were: “To thee, O Adam, we have given no certain habitation nor countenance of…
A couple of quotations from Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning , with a comment appended. He is talking about the changing meanings of “fashion” in the English Renaissance: “In the sixteenth century there appears to be an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of a human identity as a manipulable, artful process.…
Some fun quotations from Michel de Montaigne, taken from Stephen Toulmin’s excellent Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity : “He who wants to detach his soul, let him do it. When his body is ill, to free it from the contagion; at other times, on the contrary, let the soul…
Slavoj Zizek has this to say at the beginning of his The Puppet and the Dwarf : “One possible definition of modernity is: the social order in which religion is no longer fully integrated into and identified with a particular cultural life-form, but acquires autonomy, so that it can survive…
Joel Garver helpfully explains Derrida’s deconstruction of “presence/absence” by suggesting that Derrida is attacking a particular view that assumes absolute presence and absolute absence. Either a thing is here or it is not, we instinctively thing, but in fact in all kinds of ways absent things leave “traces” of their…
Barth has a wonderful discussion of the omnipotence of God in Dogmatics in Outline (pp 48-49). He disputes the notion of absolute power, power in itself, as a description of God’s almightiness, and concludes (in line with the tradition of God’s simplicity) that God’s power is His holiness, righteousness, mercy,…
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