Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The Paradosis Center at John Brown University in Siloam Spring, Arkansas, put on its first conference last week, it was a remarkable event. It was an ecumenical conference including Orthodox (John Behr, Edith Humphrey, others), Catholic (Rusty Reno, Michael Root, others), and Evangelical (Timothy George, David Lyle Jeffrey). Unusually for…
Naphtali Meshel observes in his new The "Grammar" of Sacrifice that scholars have been talking for decades about the "grammatical" character of ritual and sacrifice in general, but have never actually analyzed a specific ritual or sacrificial system grammatically. Some even talk about a "universal grammar" of sacrifice "even though…
Some Christians are rather breezy about the problem of evil. We shouldn't be. Do I need to remind you of the grisly beheadings that have taken place over the past few weeks? Do I need to remind you of the blood of innocents that’s been spilled in our own country?…
Have you ever been to a wedding where the heavens opened and a voice declared the couple “husband and wife”? Few of us have. Beautiful as they are, most marriages are quite mundane. Yet when Jesus talks about marriage, He describes it as something that God does: “What God has…
Jesus is the last and greatest of the Prophets. He is the Prophet that Moses predicted (Deuteronomy 18). That means He gives the final word, brings the blueprints for the final temple, speaks the final world into existence, and has complete and permanent access to the divine court, where He…
Paul stands against those who are “troubling” or “disturbing” the Galatians churches ( tarasso ; 1:7; also in 5:10). The reference seems to be two great troublers from the Old Testament. First, Achan is described as a “troubler” for the problems he causes in the aftermath of the battle at…
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Milbank ( Beyond Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation of the People ) points out that the Enlightenment was not simple one thing: “it can bedivided into (a) a Christian and sometimes post -Christian Ciceronian Stoicreaction against the voluntarism of ‘modern Christian’ thought;(b) a perpetuation of Reformation…
Milbank’s Beyond Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation of the People presupposes that there is a homology between metaphysics and politics. He identifies four assumptions of modern philosophy: “(1) the univocity rather than analogy of being; ( 2) knowledgeby representation rather than identity; ( 3 ) the…
Richard Beck ( The Slavery of Death ) quotes some impressive passages from Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death . They’reworthy of re-quoting. “This is what society is and always has been: asymbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customsand rules for behavior, designed to serve as a…
Observing that Christians today “sing songs of orientation in a world increasingly experienced as disoriented,” Walter Bruggemann suggests that the church is in a state of denial: “The church is less an evangelical defiance guided by faith, and must more a frightened, numb denial and deception that does not want…
I review Richard Beck’s stimulating The Slavery of Death at the Trinity House site.
Jeremiah’s message to Judah is that the Lord has given the earth into hands of his “servant,” Nebuchadnezzar: “I have given all these lands into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, My servant, and I have given him also the wild animals of the field to serve him” (27:6).…
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