Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Abbreviated Introduction to the Series Scripture is absolutely dripping with animal metaphors. Animal traits, characteristics, and appearances are attributed to God, Man, Angels, Nations, Armies. Since animals are the lowest creature in the three-tiered hierarchy, they are useful to metaphorically focus on a single aspect of God (bold like a…
Many years ago, while perusing Janice Anderson’s revised doctoral dissertation, Matthew’s Narrative Web: Over, and Over, and Over again , I was impressed by her attention to literary structures of repetition within and across Matthew’s Gospel. 1 Her research, in part, nudged me closer toward my present conviction that Matthew…
Abbreviated Introduction to the Series Scripture is absolutely dripping with animal metaphors. Animal traits, characteristics, and appearances are attributed to God, Man, Angels, Nations, Armies. Since animals are the lowest creature in the three-tiered hierarchy, they are useful to metaphorically focus on a single aspect of God (bold like a…
“Like a lily among the thorns, so is my love among the maidens… My beloved is mine and I am his; he pastures among the lilies.” Song 2:2, 16 In chapter two of the Song of Solomon, the Beloved compares his Love to a lily among thorns. The language of…
Introduction From the very beginning, angels and animals have played mediating roles between God and Man. Just as the World was made three-tiered (Heaven, Earth, Deep), so the creatures were made (Angels, Men, Animals). Before Christ came to build the permanent bridge across the chasm between God and Man, various…
Matthew 13, the third major discourse of the apostle’s gospel, is comprised almost entirely of parables. While it may seem that all the parables serve the same purpose in fulfilling the prophet Isaiah (Matthew 13:14), the parables found in verses 44–52, at the very least, function outside that purpose. This…
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Many Protestants still think of the Catholic church as a monolithic, uniform church. It’s been a long time since Catholics have thought of the church that way. Aloys Grillmeier sums up the results of Vatican II’s embrace of communio ecclesiology: “catholicity is understood as a union of opposites. The people…
Nicholas Rescher argues in Unknowability that there are certain things that logically cannot be known, such as “an idea that will never occur to any human being.” Prominent among unknowables are the unknowables of science. Given the way scientific research and discovery work, it is impossible for present science to…
Heaven, earth, sea: That three-decker universe is standard-issue in biblical cosmology (Exodus 20:11; Psalm 69:34; 96:11; 135:6; 146:6; Revelation 10:6). Occasionally a second heaven is added to the scheme (Nehemiah 9:6). But when the Lamb ascends to take the book, praise arises from four dimensions of creation: heaven, earth, under…
Thomas Guarino ( Vincent of Lerins ) outlines Newman’s arguments against the Vincentian canon (orthodoxy is what is taught always, everywhere, by everyone). In his Essay on Development , Newman provides historical examples “to demonstrate that the first rule is, at beast, a leaky and dubious criterion. As Newman boldly…
In his preface to Receptive Ecumenism , Paul Murray explains that the “driving assumption is that if all were to be asking and acting upon this question, even relatively independently of each other, then all would be moving, albeit somewhat unpredictably, and in such a fashion as might open up…
As Avery Dulles recounts it in The Catholicity of the Church , the reforms of Vatican II came partly from what Paul Murray calls “ receptive ecumenism ,” an ecumenism of attentive listening to the other. Dulles wasn’t exactly a receptive ecumenist himself. While acknowledging that “the Church can certainly…
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