Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In this essay we will think about how the whole Bible is structured as one Word of God. To begin with, there is only one Bible, not two. While we divide the Bible into Old and New Testaments, that division has no more meaning than divisions into chapters and verse,…
How should one badly bruised and inadequate church relate to another? (I am not addressing the blessed possessors of absolutely perfect churches, naturally.) I believe there are three things to bear in mind. First, we must be open to the values in other Christian traditions - even Roman Catholic and…
The third and sixth day have a second creative act. Note the chiastic arrangement of the material in these special acts and the parallelism between them, see the figure below. The author arranges the description of each day as a chiasm. Each line in the chiasm is mated with a…
Now the two of them were naked, the man and his woman, and they did not sense shame (Genesis 2:25) The nakedness of Adam and Eve requires several comments. First of all, against those who think that nakedness is what God intended for humanity as a permanent estate, we have…
I’ve been reflecting on the meaning of integration, and our longing for integration in a fragmented world. I’ve been connecting my own covenant epistemology further with the thought of scientist-philosopher Michael Polanyi, artist Makoto Fujimura, and Classical Christian metaphysician D.C. Schindler. In my last post , and now in this…
Luke 13:31-33 is one of the strangest passages in the Gospel of Luke. It begins with a time note that sounds emphatic “At that very hour.” Then, we are told of Pharisees bringing a message that Herod wants to kill Jesus! In His answer, Jesus speaks of a three day…
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Henri de Lubac notes that the traditional Christian view that man has a nature inherently receptive to a supernatural gift and fulfillment is based on revelation, and was unknown in ancient philosophy: “For the ancient Greeks - and one may say almost the same of all thinkers, ancient and modern,…
Against political/nationalist interpretations of the Hussite movement, Bynum argues that the central motif of the Hussites was direct access to blood. Two thoughts: First, this is still a central demand of the early Reformation, a point that Bynum touches on but doesn’t develop. Second, she notes that the stress is…
In her history of late medieval blood devotion ( Wonderful Blood , 2007), Caroline Walker Bynum teases out the connections between withdrawal of the cup from the laity and blood mysticism: “some of the cloistered, denied access to the cup at mass, received it in vision. Others (for example, Beatrice…
In his most recent novel (really a short novella), On Chesil Beach , Ian McEwan returns to some of the concerns of his recent work: Arnold’s Dover Beach , the way “the entire course of a life can be changed” in an instant, coitus interruptus . McEwan’s writing is always…
According to Dominican scholar Pierre Mandonnet, Thomas - that arch-scholastic - did not see theology as something “added to scripture but as something contained in it.” For Thomas, “to study and understand the Bible” was “an end, and theology a means.”
In a review of Drew Faust’s recent Republic of Suffering , Geoffrey Ward writes, “When the war began, the Union Army had no burial details, no graves registration units, no means to notify next of kin, no provision for decent burial, no systematic way to identify or count the dead,…
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