Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I grew up in the 1950s. This was before the "Sixties" and the democratization, informalization, and general cheapening of the church and her worship. Ministers were Father Donovan, Pastor Eckhart, Reverend MacPherson, Mister (Episcopal) Parker, and Brother Smith. Liturgical speech was high language, sounding kind of like the King James…
Metaphor exerts a surprisingly powerful influence within our thinking. Although it is easily dismissed as little more than a figure of speech, when we attend more closely to the ways in which we use it, metaphor’s importance swiftly becomes more apparent. Although many of our metaphors have become quite invisible…
What is a tree, scientifically speaking? A mere googling gives the following answer: “a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground.” We can increase detail by describing its family, genus, species and…
The majority of Western evangelical Christians rarely, if ever, fast as a form of spiritual discipline. In our culture, fasting is more connected with dieting than worship, the other side of our deeply ambiguous fascination with food. Food is everywhere. We eat more than ever before, at greater speed, and…
A Grammar of Creation An understanding of the visual-musical language of the Bible must begin with Genesis 1. This is fortunate, because when explaining biblical types to academics, as opposed to children, one is repeatedly forced to start from scratch. From birth, a healthy child is attuned to rhythm and…
In an inverse Eden, a land laid waste, one works alone tending the trash. There are none like him in all the earth, inquisitive, playful and most drawn to those mysterious, dancing bipedal creatures who lost earth and left it to go wandering the vast wilderness of space. Humans have…
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Genesis 29:10b-11: Jacob went up, and rolled the stone from the mouth of the well, and watered the flock of Laban his mother’s brother. Then Jacob kissed Rachel, and lifted his voice and wept. Caesarius, bishop of Arles in Southern France in the fifth century, said that the patriarchs of…
1 Timothy 3:16: By common confession great is the mystery of godliness: He who was revealed in the flesh, was vindicated in the Spirit, beheld by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory. As Pastor Wilson has emphasized this morning, pagan civilizations are…
What is the cross? For John, the cross is not the humiliation of the Son. The cross is His glorification. Jesus told Nicodemus that the Son of Man would be lifted up like the serpent in the wilderness. Jesus was referring to the event recorded in Numbers when Moses put…
In a couple of books, David deSilva interprets the letter to the Hebrews in terms of Greco-Roman clientage and patronage systems. I have my suspicions about social-science interpretations of the NT, but deSilva’s work is illuminating. In a brief study of honor and shame in Hebrews, he writes that “The…
Far from destroying ancient notions of moral luck (the notion that we must have good fortune to be ethically good), or following Stoicism in pulling back the moral into the inner soul, Christianity, in Milbank’s view, “embraces moral luck to such an extreme degree that it transforms all received ideas…
In an essay in Being Reconciled , Milbank describes postmodernity as “dissolving of fixed limits” in several respects: “(1) the blurring of the nature/culture divide; (2) the merging of public and private; (3) the mode of the information economy; and (4) economic and political globalization.” He argues that “postmodernity, like…
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