Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In a brief article entitled, “The Theology of Old Testament Sacrifice," Gordon Wenham, expanding on a comment about ritual from anthropologist Monica Wilson, states: We resort to ritual when we want to express our deepest feelings. Consider the rituals used in greeting people in our society: a nod, a handshake,…
Everyone here in Cambridge is talking about sacrifice. My supervisor, Dr. John Milbank, is working on a book on gift in which he is dealing with recent literature on sacrifice. The graduate seminar in Systematics during Michaelmas Term focused on the theme of sacrifice. The first presenter was Dr. Ian…
Protestant-Catholic debates about the sacraments have usually taken the form of debates about sacramental efficacy. Protestants claim that Catholics believe that sacraments work ex opere operato , virtually a magical view of the sacraments. A priest goes through the motions and says the hocus-pocus and "presto!" the sacraments confer grace.…
When Israel came out of Egypt, she was a collection of tribes descended from the Tribe of Abraham. Tribalism drops out of history into the "world" by looking back to ancestors and by orienting to the spirits that govern the world. The world must not be manipulated, because to do…
Angels are the mediators of the Old Creation, as Eugenio Corsini has rightly pointed out in his commentary, The Apocalypse. For this reason, argues Corsini, the book of Revelation must have to do with the final end of the Old Creation order, which he associates with the work of Jesus…
Our procedure in "Through New Eyes Volume 2" thus far has been to lay out the general overview of history and its meaning as the Bible presents it. My hope is to fill this out in four major sections, corresponding to the four ages and the four testaments in the…
Showing page 273 of 309
Showing page 29 of 43
E xplaining the numerological structure of Psalm 72, C. J. Labuschagne points out that the Psalm has 17 verses and adds, “The 17-word doxology, together with its 2-word conclusion . . . ‘Amen, Amen' (vs. 18-19), brings the total number of words of the entire poem up to 156 (6…
G od is the Father of precipitation, Job says (Job 38:25–30). Rain is filial, the Father’s nourishing gift to the world. The imagery appears elsewhere. The righteous king is “like rain upon the mown grass” (Psalm 72:6), and the king’s “favor is like a cloud with the spring rain” (Proverbs…
A t ESPN , Elaine Teng states the obvious: San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg “Pop” Popovich has an unequalled record of success. Since he took over the Spurs twenty years ago, his teams have never failed to make the playoffs. In all sports, the closest contender is Pittsburgh's NHL Penguins,…
L uigino Bruni ( The Wound and the Blessing ) argues that “society without markets and contracts cannot be civil.” Without markets “it is not mutual love that usually takes their place; the void left without contracts is frequently filled by power relationships in which the strongest exploit the weakest.”…
R evisiting William Cavanaugh’s devastating 2009 The Myth of Religious Violence . The myth of Cavanaugh’s title is a well-known one. According to the myth, religion is a distinct sphere of human life and practice from the rest of human social life, a universal impulse in human beings, and is…
I n an essay on the “limits of the state,” Timothy Mitchell tests several theories of the state and finds them wanting. Shortly after World War II, American political scientists generally abandoned the concept of the state “as a concept too vague and too narrow to be the basis of…
Showing page 181 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
