Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In this essay we will think about how the whole Bible is structured as one Word of God. To begin with, there is only one Bible, not two. While we divide the Bible into Old and New Testaments, that division has no more meaning than divisions into chapters and verse,…
How should one badly bruised and inadequate church relate to another? (I am not addressing the blessed possessors of absolutely perfect churches, naturally.) I believe there are three things to bear in mind. First, we must be open to the values in other Christian traditions - even Roman Catholic and…
The third and sixth day have a second creative act. Note the chiastic arrangement of the material in these special acts and the parallelism between them, see the figure below. The author arranges the description of each day as a chiasm. Each line in the chiasm is mated with a…
Now the two of them were naked, the man and his woman, and they did not sense shame (Genesis 2:25) The nakedness of Adam and Eve requires several comments. First of all, against those who think that nakedness is what God intended for humanity as a permanent estate, we have…
I’ve been reflecting on the meaning of integration, and our longing for integration in a fragmented world. I’ve been connecting my own covenant epistemology further with the thought of scientist-philosopher Michael Polanyi, artist Makoto Fujimura, and Classical Christian metaphysician D.C. Schindler. In my last post , and now in this…
Luke 13:31-33 is one of the strangest passages in the Gospel of Luke. It begins with a time note that sounds emphatic “At that very hour.” Then, we are told of Pharisees bringing a message that Herod wants to kill Jesus! In His answer, Jesus speaks of a three day…
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Balances were essential to commerce in ancient Israel, weighing not only commodities to be bought and sold but in some cases weighing the gold and silver that served as the medium of exchange. A merchant could cheat customers by adjusting the scales to his advantage. According to Proverbs 11:1, such…
“Do not move an ancient landmark,” Solomon says in Proverbs 23:10. Just what a king would say: Kings want to keep things just as they are, and convince everyone that they have always been so, so long as they can sit on top of the heap. But the sequel of…
Michael Bruno’s Political Augustinianism is a thorough examination of recent interpretations of Augustine’s political thought, starting with French scholars like H.I. Marrou and H. X. Arquillière, whose 1933 L’Augustinianisme Politique set the terms for much subsequent discussion, through the realist uses of Augustine in Niebuhr and the “secularist” interpretation of…
George Friedman has written that the promise of the European union was not merely prosperity and peace, but joy: “the joy of joining men into a single brotherhood, overcoming the divisions of mere custom.” But here’s the rub: Europeans have to be willing to share the same fate if they…
The TLS reviewer of Peter Unger’s Empty Ideas is not much impressed with Unger’s critique of analytic philosophy. According to Unger, “Contemporary analytic metaphysicians see themselves as theorizing boldly and systematically about the deepest and most general nature of reality. In Peter Unger’s view, they are deluded: far from resuming…
Philip Caldwell’s Liturgy As Revelation is a successful book on several levels. Caldwell fills out recent accounts of twentieth-century Catholicism by attending to some lesser-known figures associated in various ways with the nouvelle theologie : Rene Latourelle, Salvatore Marsili, Gustave Martelet, and, a later figure, Avery Dulles. Caldwell’s analyses of…
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