Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
"Vanity of vanities", says the Preacher. "All is vanity". Life, we are told in the book of Ecclesiastes, is a repetitious, wearisome cycle; all that is and all that will be has already been. There is nothing new under the sun. What is crooked cannot be made straight, what is…
The Bible tells us that when God created the earth, He set up three zones of life. The first was the world itself. The second was the holy land of Eden. And the third was the Garden in Eden, God’s sanctuary. God told Adam and Eve that every tree was…
In our survey of Biblical chronology we have arrived at the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, which provide chronological information for the period after the return from exile, the Restoration Period of Old Testament history. The question we begin to address in this essay is whether the Artaxerxes of these…
These verses from the Sermon on the Mount are generally taken in connection with Jesus’ earlier statement concerning adultery in the heart (vv. 27-28); the eye and the hand have obvious relevance to the sin of adultery. At the same time, most commentators admit that the principle of avoiding occasions…
17. The eye that mocks a father, And despises to obey a mother, The ravens of the valley will pick it out, And the young eagles will eat it. 18. There are three things that are too wonderful for me, Four that I do not understand: 19. The way of…
The modern Church in America and virtually everywhere else is ideology-centered, not geographical. This is because various Churches believe different things and have different customs of worship and sacraments. The ideological Church has gradually developed from the time of the Reformation, because accuracy of doctrine has become more important to…
Showing page 299 of 309
Showing page 30 of 43
For postmoderns, there is a close link between the timeless self of ancient and modern thought and the primacy of the gaze. The exaltation of the visual that Foucault attacks is expressed quite openly in an essay by Hans Jonas, “The Nobility of Sight,” who describes some of the philosophical…
A bit of nonsense from several years ago. Scene 1 Mr Faust sitting in a big chair, with Little Faust on his lap, reading. Mrs Faust sitting in another chair, knitting or something. Mr Faust: And I heard him exclaim As he drove out of sight Merry Christmas to all…
INTRODUCTION The Roman Catholic church teaches many false things about Mary the mother of Jesus, but in reaction Protestants have sometimes simply ignored her. Like Joseph, she is a model of discipleship; and she is a living portrait of the church, the people in whom Christ takes shape (cf. Galatians…
Michel Foucault suggests that the modern exalation of sight, the gaze, particularly the medical gaze, is associated with death: “That which hides and envelops, the curtain of night over truth, is, paradoxically, life; and death, on the contrary, opens up to the light of day the black coffer of the…
The Western quest for “personal identity” rests, in part, on a confusion of different senses of the term. We recognize that there are degrees of sameness among things: Identical twins are never strictly identical. Paul Ricoeur has pointed out, further, that we tend to confuse two senses of “identity,” which…
Grading several papers on Esther, it occurs to me that the book is more about Mordecai’s exalation than about Esther. Esther’s exalation to queen is part of the means by which Mordecai and the Jews are ultimately saved, and the story climaxes with Mordecai at the right hand of the…
Showing page 1916 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
