Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Thus says the Lord: “A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more” (Jer 31:15). The Night of the Hunter belongs on every Christian’s Christmas list. My family has even…
One important part of Jesus's birth narrative is the presence of angels. The angel Gabriel appeared to the Virgin Mary, announcing that she would bear a son. And then, on the night Jesus was born, a whole host of angels appeared to the shepherds. Angels are mysterious creatures to us.…
I was settled nicely into my chair and listening to the conversation in an undergrad religion seminar, my last required course to graduate. Though a few Christians sat scattered around the room, the course itself was dedicated to poking holes in traditional understandings of the Bible: our readings deconstructed notions…
God’s symbols belong to Him and to His people. They are constantly at work in the world, including the world of film, music, painting, architecture, and other artforms. You cannot escape God’s symbols or the meaning He has woven into the created order. Artists use and borrow God’s symbols, whether…
For centuries, Christians identified Israel in the Old Testament as a single, literal ethnic group, often called “the Jews.” Even supersessionists – those who believed the Church superseded Israel – assumed the clear-cut, technical definition of “Israel” in the Bible is the ethnic group. However, a deeper dive into Genesis,…
Misreading Intent In the opening verses of Matthew 11, the reader is confronted immediately by John the baptizer who has been imprisoned since 4:12. John poses a question to Jesus, inquiring from prison as to whether or not he is Israel’s awaited Messiah or if they should anticipate another: “Are…
Showing page 1 of 309
Showing page 3 of 43
Responding to my earlier post on memory, Wes Callihan writes: “We can’t always go back to the physical surroundings; that’s the problem. We can, however, go back in our imaginations and it seems that that was what the classical art of memory (the ‘palace of memory’) was all about. A…
INTRODUCTION Nowhere in the Bible do we find as many references to demons as in the gospels. When Jesus arrives, Satan begins an all-out assault, and this provokes the great conflict at the center of history: Satan and his demons against the Spirit-filled son of David. THE TEXT “Then one…
Matthew 12:8: For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath. The Sabbath is an institution, a rule, a commandment, a marker of time, a social practice that distinguishes Jews from Gentiles. It is also a basic structure of human history. The creation week begins with the creation of…
Jesus knows how to confront. He issues a series of eight woes against the Pharisees and scribes, and they are very severe. When He is challenged, He often raises the stakes instead of qualifying himself. He knows what it’s like to attack and not back down. In our sermon text,…
Stephen Kern suggestively notes that Bergson, Proust, and Freud, who all “insisted that the past was an essential source of the full life,” had Jewish backgrounds, and he doesn’t think this an accident: “Both Judaism and Christianity share a reverence for the past and argue their validity partly from tradition.…
I rush out of my library, resolutely intending to tell something to my wife in the next room. When I get there, my intention is gone. I go back to the library, and find the memory of what I wanted to say, undulating lightly in the air. Augustine wanted to…
Showing page 1533 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
