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…
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Gregory of Nyssa discerned that Arianism erred because it “defines God’s being by its having no beginning, rather than by its having no end . . . . If they must divine eternity, let them reverse their doctrine and find the mark of deity in endless futurity . . .…
My two favorite paragraphs from Jenson’s Triune Identity : “‘Out of the being of the Father’ affirms just that origin of Christ within God’s own self which Arius most feared. The phrase says that the Son is not an entity originated outside God by God’s externally directed choice, that he…
Behind Arianism, Jenson sees the typical Hellenistic desire to escape time: “what moves Arius is the late-Hellenic need to escape time, to become utterly dominant. If we are to be saved, Arius supposes, there must be some reality entirely uninvolved with time, which has no origin of any sort and…
Jenson summarizes several thread of Tertullian’s Trinitarian theology: “Tertullian’s interpretation of God was far more biblical than that of the Apologists. He explicitly distinguished the living personal God of Scripture from both the numina of the old Roman religion and the abstract deity of Hellenism . . . . So…
The basic structure of redemptive history is an exitus and reditus structure, going out from God and return to Him. For Thomas, Emery says, “The Trinitarian processions provide the doctrinal foundation of the exitus-reditus structure of the world and of history.” He quotes Thomas as saying, “Just as the procession…
RPC Hanson writes, “At the heart of the Arian Gospel was a God who suffered. Their elaborate theology of the relation of the Son to the Father which so much preoccupied their opponents was defised in order to find a way of envisaging the Christian doctrine of God which would…
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