Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I thought it might be good to put this up here, since it is 14 years old, and itself reflects earlier discussion. From this you can see that we at BH have been considering this notion for quite some time. Clearly, the last word has not been said. — James…
Hopefully, my commentary on James will be out later this year. But here are a few chiasms for your consideration. I think the James 5 chiasm orginally came from Doug Jordan. The entire book of James is focused on how the pastors and leaders (“brothers”) of the church use their…
In my first post I noted that the parables of Jesus were not simply illustrative stories. They are really nothing like the kind of simple, homely illustrations that preachers often use to explain difficult concepts to their congregations. Just to be clear: there’s nothing wrong with illustrating one’s sermonic statements.…
Ephesians is often treated as a pure type example of the Pauline method that “the indicative preceds the imperative.” But what Paul does first is pray . Simply reading verse 3 and following involves readers in a prayer of thanksgiving to God–and much more so for those listening to the…
Yesterday, I took part with my oldest son in a church-sponsored city outreach project (not because I’m especially prone to such behavior but because my son has a Boy Scout requirement that this would help him meet). Before we were sent out on our various jobs, the leader gave a…
There is a scene in Prince Caspian , the second in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia that helps explain why it is we have four Gospels, that is four accounts of the Good News of Jesus Christ—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It is the account of Lucy’s longed-for experience…
Showing page 215 of 309
Showing page 3 of 43
Someone asked me recently about my views on church and state. I replied that I advocate a "Christendom model" of church-state relations. Then I proceeded to qualify. When I was done qualifying, I suddenly wondered whether what I call "Christendom" corresponds to what other people understand by the word. It…
Ezra begins where 2 Chronicles ends, with the decree of Cyrus. Some scholars have argued that the repetition indicates that the books were once united. It's said that the doubling is an ancient literary device to knot together two sections of a text. Whether that is the case or not,…
James Simpson briefly reviews the career of the 17th-century iconoclast William Dowsing in his history of iconoclasm, Under the Hammer . What motivated Dowsing, he argues, wasn't an effort to prioritize the word over the image, but a quest for "jurisdictional clarity." With the triumph of Parliament, the complex jurisdictional…
The key question regarding Freud, says Rosenstock-Huessy ( In the Cross of Reality , 266), is "Whom did Freud obey when he began to develop his theory?" The question arises because "in Freud's relational system there is no place for Sigmund Freud's own experience." He shares this distinction of an…
Alexandra Schwartz's New Yorker essay on self-improvement movements ( "Improving Ourselves to Death" ) starts out breezily enough, but it turns grim pretty fast. The "death" in her title isn't metaphorical. She summarizes the experiment of Carl Cederström and André Spicer, who tried to improve one area of their lives…
In a TLS review of Kontantin Barsht's Drawings and Calligraphy of Fyodor Dostoevsky , Robert Bird reminds us that Dostoevsky was a "trained draughtsman" who "thought in images no less than in words: "He wrote frequently about painting, and many of his key terms suggest visual, rather than verbal communication,…
Showing page 100 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
