Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The corona virus hit Western society like a Biblical plague — almost. Biblical plagues were actually much more devastating. Still, as Peter Leithart describes the present situation, it is a judgment from God, because the disease itself together with our political solutions brought about a social situation that fits Deuteronomy’s…
“The achievements of theologians don’t do anything, don’t affect anything, don’t mean anything. What makes anyone think that ‘theology’ is a subject at all?” - Richard Dawkins One cannot be a Christian college president or seminary trustee (your essayist is both) without wondering if Richard Dawkins’s notorious take-down of theology…
Nearly every church that I am aware of has adopted differing practices since the recent virus scare began. Some churches continued to meet during the state lock downs, and other churches left their building empty, meeting online through various video conference technologies. Some churches have gone back to life as…
Fear is an inseparable companion of human life. We are afraid of illness and death, poverty and cataclysms, rejection and betrayal, failure and shame. We are afraid of the unknown, so in a sense we are afraid of the future and life itself. Unless we live in the illusory belief…
In the title above, I put the word “heresies” in quotation marks because I would prefer that the word “heresy” be confined to erroneous beliefs about the Trinity and the Person of Christ, rather than be used broadly to describe any view that might be considered an error. 1 At…
I’ve been trying to work out why I’m feeling existentially disconnected from CoV-19-related fears. I’m taking it seriously, but it’s not registering in any deeply personal way. Partly it’s that my routines are largely undisrupted. But as I reflect on people’s reactions I think there’s more, because a lot of…
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In his Natural History of Religion, David Hume proposes an evolutionary progress from natural polytheism to more developed monotheism. This, he thinks, is the natural and virtually inevitable progress: “As far as writing or history reaches, mankind, in ancient times, appears universally to have been polytheists” and idolaters. It makes…
Protestant problematics about sacraments still run in the background of early modern debates about religion. In response to evidence of similarities between Jewish and “savage” Indian religion, some early modern thinkers argued that the ritual similarities were marginal to Judaism. Some thought of Jewish ceremonies as a kind of prophylactic…
Many scholars have concluded that the Jubilee legislation of Leviticus 25 is an idealized portrait of an institution that Israel never practiced. In a 2003 essay in Vetus Testamentum , Lee Casperson takes issue with this viewpoint: “There are extensive parallels in the ancient Near East, long predating the entry…
Leigh Trevaskis tries to suss out the rationale for sticking Leviticus 24 (menorah, showbread, blasphemy) between Leviticus 23 (Israel’s festival calendar) and Leviticus 25 (Jubilee). He proposes a symbolic solution to the puzzle. He observes that chapter 24 begins with a reverence to “light” (v. 2), alluding back to the…
Esther Lightcap Meek presents the most devastating little critiques of epistemological dualism I’ve ever read near the beginning of A Little Manual for Knowing . Epistemological dualism describes the way we “distinguish knowledge from beliefs, facts from values, reason from faith, theory from application, thought from emotion, mind from body,…
Halbertal ( On Sacrifice , 72-3) offers this fine analysis of the self-justificating moves of aggressors: “The mind can play complicated games, and among them is the accusation that an aggressor directs toward his victim for causing him to become violent, which all too easily turns into a justification for…
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