Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In our first essay we looked at Kline’s flawed exegesis of Genesis 2:5 as it relates to Day 3 of creation. Now we turn to Kline’s new argument against a chronological reading of Genesis 1, as found, again, in "Space and Time in the Genesis Cosmogony," Perspectives on Science and…
One of the advantages of paying very close attention to the details in the Bible, especially chronological and genealogical details, is that they can shed light on situations that don’t seem to make much sense apart from them. One such situation is that of Bathsheba. It appears that Bathsheba willingly…
Once upon a time, Jeff Meyers and Tony Rollins–old friends who had not seen each other for a few years–met in the parking lot of a neighborhood church. They were dropping off their pre-school children at the church for Mother’s Day Out. They were such conscientious and helpful fathers. As…
Years ago, when I was at the briefly-existing Geneva Divinity School, I taught a course in the Apocrypha. One thing that struck me at that time is that two of the stories are almost certainly religious allegories (as well as moral tales): Judith and Susanna. Since "Susanna" means "Lily," this…
Peter’s essay inspires me to write up some similar thoughts about the flower of the field. Rightly does Peter associate the almond with Yahweh’s garden, because the Garden of Eden is symbolically positioned as parallel to the Holy Place of the Tabernacle and Temple. To wit: Since Aaron’s rod blossomed…
We have had occasion to discuss the views of Meredith G. Kline previously in these newsletters, and now it is time to do so again. Kline teaches at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and also at the Westminster Theological Seminaries (Philadelphia and San Diego). He is the author of some interesting insights…
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The premise of Bonaventure’s “reduction of arts to theology” is that all knowledge, skill, perception is about light. Good and perfect gifts come down from the Father of Lights, James says, and Bonaventure sees that light refracted into four types of light. Some are obvious: the inner light of reason…
God alone, Augustine says, can act directly on souls. We cannot, but that doesn’t mean we can’t act on other souls. In Augustine’s anthropology, this is done through the body, by “signals conveyed by the physical body.” Such physical signs might be gestures, facial expressions, or “conventional indications such as…
Augustine, of course, says that pride is the beginning of revolt and sin. A prideful soul is one that refuses to recognize that “the whole quality of the soul’s existence is from God” and therefore that it is “enlivened in mental activity and in self-consciousness by God’s presence.” God, Augustine…
In his early treatise de musica , Augustine arranges everything into a hierarchy: God and other immutable objects above; human souls between; bodies and other carnal things below. It’s a Neoplatonic and hardly Christian notion. But embedded within that Augustine gets at something more sound. “Delight or enjoyment sets the…
Washington, Augustus on a prancing horse, sword pointing toward sunset. Over the pond, fringed with ice, droop the weeping willows. And what I miss most in the pine-blanketed West: leafless trees in cold sunshine.
In expounding on the coherence of Trinitarian theology with contemporary physics, Polkinghorne notes htat “it is striking that so methodologically reductionist a subject as physics has pointed us in this relational and holistic direction. This tendency is surely reinforced by chaos theory’s discovery that at the macroscopic level of physical…
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