Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
“What’s the fastest route” he asks me as we quickly come to a stop behind a sea of red brake lights. I pull out my phone and map all the options. Every way is red with traffic backed up. Deep down I must be a small town girl because traffic…
Dear Friend of Theopolis, I have signed a stack of documents in the years since we started Theopolis, but my heart jumped a few beats as I looked at the thick lease contract. “This is real,” I thought. “This makes it really real.” Theopolis has been real for nearly three…
In the Edenic world of Perelandra, from C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, Ransom notices something about how the Green Lady treats the animals: [1] “There was in her face an authority, in her caresses a condescension, [2] which by taking seriously the inferiority of her adorers made them somehow less inferior…
In my previous two articles, I argued for the significance of the fact that baptism addresses our bodies in their objectivity. In the body, the self has an existence that runs deeper than our consciousness, decision, self-expression, and action. In washing our passive bodies, baptism seals us with an anticipatory…
Judah is a sinful nation, weighed down with iniquity. They are not the seed of Abraham, but the seed of iniquity. Their worship is abominable to Yahweh, because their hands are covered with innocent blood. They have not done good, or sought justice, or reproved the ruthless, or defended the…
Although we tend to define ourselves by our subjectivity —our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, decisions, actions—we are frequently forgetful of the objectivity of the self as body, the reality of the self that underlies and precedes all of our subjectivity. The body is the site of our ‘givenness’, where we are…
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Paul's sermons in Acts 13 and 17 both employ language connected with the theme of justification that occupies so much attention in Romans and Galatians. Yet Paul uses the same concepts and terminology in ways that don't seem to fit his usage in the epistles. In Acts 13:38-39, he tells…
In her book on Common Prayer , Ramie Targoff claims that “What emerges in the aftermath of the Reformation is less a triumphant embrace of the individual's private and individual self than a concerted effort to shape the otherwise uncontrollable and unreliable internal sphere through common acts of devotion” (6).…
The genealogy of Levi is at the center of the genealogical section of 1 Chronicles. The genealogy begins with Adam and reaches ahead to the restoration from exile. In short, the genealogies survey all of human history, and, with the Levites at the center, it's as if the human race…
Early on in David Downs's study of Alms and atonement in early Christianity, he offers this striking quotation from Basil. He urges his hearers to keep the commandment to feed the hungry “as you would take hold of a fugitive, securing it from all sides with grasping hands and encircling…
Theological investigations of Naziism are often dogged by “a subtle methodological difficulty,” writes Paul Hinlicky in Before Auschwitz (2): “the ‘retrospective fallacy,' sometimes also called ‘presentism.'” As Hinlicky explains, “Unlike the historical actors in church and society during the 1920s and 1930s in Germany, our inquiry benefits from certain knowledge…
Paul's criticism of idols in his Athens speech repeats philosophical commonplaces about the nature of God and the difference between God and images, commonplaces as old as Plato and as contemporary as Seneca. But they were philosophical commonplaces. Lane Fox has pointed out that the philosophical skepticism about images was…
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