Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Understanding Shakespeare’s Biblical references is vital for the interpretation of many, if not all, of Shakespeare’s plays. For Othello , it is especially important, not only because the interpretation of the play is contested among various approaches — feminist, homosexual, post-colonial, Marxist, Freudian, new historical, and others — but also…
Mike Allen of Reformed Theological Seminary, Orlando, scores some points in his review of The End of Protestantism . He lodges the fair complaint that my rhetoric sometimes outruns my evidence. He argues that more stress on the present reality of the church’s unity deepens the tragedy of division; divisions…
I begin with two observations. First, on any millennial view, the Christian account of history is progressive, moving from the garden to the city. It is eschatological not only in that there is an end, but that the end is a glorified beginning, not merely a return to origins. To…
The church is a new form of polity that erupts into the world as much as the Son of God comes into the world. It’s a real-world political alternative to the polities of the ancient world. It resolves many of the political dilemmas of the ancient world, though not simply…
In my last post , I explained how Baptists really have a “one-ordinance-one sacrament” ecclesiology. I said this: “what Baptists really believe, in modern parlance, is that there is one ordinance (baptism which is a sign or symbol only) and one sacrament (the Lord’s Supper in which feeding upon Jesus…
One of the most extensive and penetrating responses to the Yoder-Hauerwas attack on Constantiniansm is found in Oliver O’Donovan’s Desire of Nations , in a chapter entitled “The Obedience of Rulers.” O’Donovan defines the word “Christendom” as “a historical idea,” specifically “the idea of a professedly Christian secular political order,…
Showing page 111 of 309
Showing page 3 of 43
I am preaching through Luke at Trinity Reformed Church, and I will be posting sermon notes at this site. Here are the notes from last week’s sermon: Things Fulfilled Among Us, Luke 1:1-56 INTRODUCTION Luke’s gospel is the first part of a two-volume work. Luke wrote his gospel to tell…
At the beginning of the worship service at Trinity Reformed Church, where I’m serving as organizing pastor, I give an exhortation. Here is the exhortation for this week: This week, the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America (ECUSA) confirmed Gene Robinson, an openly…
Bruce Ellis Benson’s Graven Ideologies , a study of Nietzsche, Derrida, and Marion, confirms something I’ve suspected from my sketchy reading of Derrida. Benson says that Derrida emphasizes that all thought is set in a structure of “not yet but still to come.” This is Derrida’s famed notion that final…
I’ve been reading a good bit of Mikhail Bakhtin this summer, and have come across some pretty mind-blowing passages in his Dialogic Imagination and Rabelais and his World . The following quotations have to do with the role of humor in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The laughing, parodic-travestying literature…
Another article from Biblica , this time from 1991, on the use of ” herem ” (“the ban”) in 1 Kings 20:42, where it is part of the Lord’s complaint against Ahab after he lets Ben Hadad go free. Philip Stern argues that the author of Kings uses the word…
There’s a neat little study of 1 Kings 16:34 (Hiel’s rebuilding of Jericho) in a 1996 issue of Biblica . Charles Conroy, the author, begins with a structural analysis of 1 Kings 16:29-34. He points out that grammatically the passage breaks down into an introductory statement (29a), a summary of…
Showing page 2212 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
