Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Christians get sex wrong when we start from the wrong end. We start from human desires, passions, biological drives and “needs.” These are treated as givens, as the base-line natural reality of human sexuality. Then we come to the Bible and find, to our surprise, that God places all kinds…
Why isn't Proverbs better known as the Bible's book on "manliness"? I use quotation marks because the term almost seems archaic in our present culture, along with "manhood." Perhaps the Church is too embarrassed to admit the Bible addresses that much attention to the topic. But another reason can be…
In certain evangelical Christian churches it is the tradition to exalt preaching above the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Ever since the rise of Revivalist preachers pushing for conversions, the practice has cast doubt upon the possibility of Baptism or the Lord’s Supper being a “means of grace”…
Perhaps one of the most stimulating sections of Yoram Hazony’s The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture addresses the question of how we are to discern the meaning of biblical narratives, especially how biblical narratives might present arguments of a more general nature. Hazony quotes John Barton’s remarks about the difficulty of…
In this slender volume, Joseph Minich (Ph.D. student at the University of Dallas) attempts to answer some of the deepest questions of human existence. With his honesty, his probing questioning, his wide reading, and his ability to plunge beneath superficial answers, he provides a helpful source of reflection for fellow…
A Closer Look at Noah’s Post-Flood Humiliation In Genesis 9:20-27 My wife is currently leading a Bible study through Genesis for a group of insatiable Bible students. Because she is a deep thinker and has a high view of inspiration, there is no passage she is unwilling to face head…
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Milbank makes a couple of interesting points regarding the import of an Augustinian view of evil. 1) Augustine’s view assumes the goodness of matter, in fact the goodness of all being. This, Milbank claims, seems to excuse evil - it’s some lack, a weakness or finitude, that makes for evil.…
In the view of many, the Holocaust belied the Augustinian description of evil as the privation of good. Something much more insidiously positive was at work in the death camps. Hannah Arendt, however, seems to confirm the Augustinian perspective in her treatment of the banality of evil. According to Milbank,…
Kant bristles at the demand that he claims to hear “on all sides”: ” Don’t argue !” Officers tell us to obey, tax-officials to pay, clergy to pray in a certain way. But Kant wants to argue. Or does he? Maybe not: “in some affairs which affect the interests of…
Kant’s appeal in “What Is Enlightenment?” is not primarily intellectual but ethical. Enlightenment, Kant says, “is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.” Immaturity he defines as “the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another,” and this immaturity is “self-incurred” when the cause is “lack of resolution…
David Gelernter, Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion . New York: Doubleday, 2007. 229 pp. Hardback, $24.95. America, G. K. Chesterton said, is a nation with the soul of a church. David Gelernter, the polymathic computer scientist from Yale, suggests that this doesn’t quite go far enough. For many, both…
Wiker and Witt suggest that God created pandas as “comic relief” in a blessed fit of “divine whimsy.” The suggestion is troubling even for Christians who defend creation, because, being engineers, they have swallowed the reductive notion that creation must be functional. Wiker and Witt offer this rejoinder: “To spurn…
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