Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The Blessing of the Father The narrative of the Exodus makes it clear that Yahweh is Israel’s Father. Moses is told to declare to Pharaoh that “Israel is my firstborn son, and I say to you, ‘Let my son go that he may serve me’” (Exodus 4:22-23). In contrast to…
When reading the Old Testament, the believer faces two dilemmas. First, there is a seemingly sharp discontinuity between the universal proclamation of the gospel to the whole earth and God’s singling out of the nation of Israel. Second, the New Testament says of Jesus that “there is no other name…
John 17 contains the longest prayer that we have from Jesus, and it shows us the intimate relationship between the Father and the Son in a way that few passages do. The prayer lays out the chiastic pattern noted by Athanasius (God became man so that man could become God),…
The following meditation on the incarnation is paraphrased and quoted from Karl Barth, The Doctrine of Reconciliation (Church Dogmatics, Vol. 4, Part 1) , pp. 185ff. In the incarnation, the eternal Son of God makes His way into a far country, and takes on the form of a servant. “But…
Peter says "baptism saves you" (1 Peter 3:21). Does the New Testament teach that "baptism justifies you"? I think the answer is Yes. That's a controversial answer, and demands some defense and explanation, but first some critical qualifications. No New Testament text states "baptism justifies you," so my argument will…
In his THI article “ Son of David, Son of Abraham ,” Peter Leithart notes that Matthew's genealogy “contains a summary of redemptive history.” This statement is only too true and one that deserves further elucidation. Biblos genese ō s. The first two words of Matthew's Gospel are usually translated…
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According to Michael Nerlich ( Ideology of Adventure ), “all figures of the Greek and Latin novels of adventure are ‘involuntary’ adventurers.” Mikhail Bakhtin too ( Dialogic Imagination ) emphasizes that in earlier adventures “an individual can be nothing other than completely passive, completely unchanging” and function as “merely the…
Winder McConnell ( Nibelungenleid , 98-99) sketches the changing uses of the epic in the mid-20 th century: “During the Weimar Republic, the themes and motifs of the Nibelungenlied had been employed by authors of antirepublican persuasion to express optimism for Germany’s future, but poets and dramatists sympathetic to the…
In an essay in A Companion to Gottfried of Strassburg's Tristan , Ulrich Muller argues that “In Tristan und Isolde Wagner radically transformed the meaning and message of Gottfried’s romance, just as he had in Parsifal. As cast by Gottfried (and in all medieval versions), the lovers and their love…
Andreas Capellanus literally wrote the book on the Art of Courtly Love , but the concluding Book 3 suggests that the book was a cautionary tale throughout. Capellanus closes the treatise with an exhortation to Walter, the man to whom the book is addressed to abstain from the desires of…
Even today, when historians have abandoned the idea, many regard the Middle Ages as a time dark and ignorant, the huddled masses in shadows until the burst of light that came with the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment. For centuries, it is often thought, medieval thinkers knew little of the…
Allegorization was one of the techniques medieval used, adapted from ancient writers, to incorporate pagan writing in a biblical framework. As Ernst Curtius ( European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages ) writes, “the Middle Ages subjected profane writers to allegorical interpretation exactly as it did the Bible, and .…
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