Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Along His journey to Jerusalem, Jesus stops frequently to have meals, three times with Pharisees (7:37-50; 11:37-54; 14:1-35). Meals were central to Jesus’ ministry. He comes “eating and drinking” (Luke 7:34). While His meals are not just for refreshment, they are opportunities for teaching the protocols of the kingdom. Meals…
Time as a realm of participation can be difficult for us imaginatively to grasp. While music is a profoundly temporal art, exploring the medium of time like no other, most of our temporal experience seems decidedly unmusical in character, disjointed and unorchestrated. The form in which we naturally discover time…
John devotes much attention to Jesus’ burial clothes. He tells us that Nicodemus brought about a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes to spice Jesus body, and that He was bound in linen wrappings. We find out that His body and His head were wrapped separately. (John 19:39-40; 20:6-7). When…
Thinking about time in terms of music also helps us to appreciate its unity and inner relations. Henri Bergson observes our cultural habit of dividing time into discrete moments, and conceiving of these as if akin to objects in a spatial succession. [1] Against such a notion, Bergson argues for…
As we attend to these and other aspects of music’s temporality, Begbie suggests, we will find means by which to resist some of our habitual modern ways of conceptualizing time, most especially our tendency to conceive of time as if it were a homogeneous set of technologically quantifiable units laid…
The Hidden Dimension In many fields of scientific study, the apparent complications and contradictions are dispelled once the internal logic is perceived. Biblical hermeneutics is no different, since the author of Creation is the Author of the Word. The Bible’s literary labyrinth radiates organically from an algorithm so simple it…
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Martyrs share in Jesus' suffering and death. Martyrs also come to life as Jesus did. This is what John calls the “first resurrection” (Revelation 20:5). That is the argument presented by GB Caird ( Revelation of St. John the Divine , 255). Jesus' resurrection, he argues, “had a double sequel,…
In a lively exchange with Eugene McCarraher , John Milbank summarizes his views on democracy. Like Chesterton, he is a defender of the democracy of the dead, and he insists that this is not simply “a defense of the given and an assault on the present.” That is, he claims,…
“Despite the central role which the priesthood played in Israel's life and worship,” writes Nicholas Haydock ( The Theology of the Levitical Priesthood ), it has only a small role in “the majority of Old Testament theologies” (xii). This neglect is partly due to the influence of Wellhausen's documentary thesis,…
There are a number of “seconds” in the book of Revelation. References to the “second death” surround the book (2:11; 20:6, 14; 21:8), and there is a second seal (6:3), a second woe (11:14), and several second angels (8:8; 14:8; 16:3). The living creatures are enumerated, the lion first, the…
In his introduction to Scott Cairns's collection, Slow Pilgrim , Gregory Wolfe recounts Cairns's development as a poet. He grew up “within a powerful religious subculture that splits the spirit off from the letter, reducing faith to didactic legalism. These fellow religionists of his youth loved nothing better than to…
JT Fraser begins one of his essays in Time and Time Again with this lovely sketch of a musical cosmology: “The noble English art of change ringing consists of the ringing of a set of bells of different pitches, according to sequences that follow stable mathematical patterns. A set of…
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