Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
It seems to be old news, but I was unaware of it until recently. Australian academics argued that mothers should be allowed to terminate the life of a newborn child. [i] Why would they promote such an idea? Because before the child is born it is not always possible to…
This is the second of two essays introducing Pascal’s Wager. Click HERE for Part 1. In “The Pop Star and the Mathematician” I gave an overview of the apologetic approach commonly called Pascal’s Wager. In that Wager, 17 th -century French mathematician Blaise Pascal argued that the choice between Christian…
This is the first of two essays aiming to introduce the reader to Pascal’s Wager. The second will address criticisms of the Wager. In the early 1990s, a perennially popular British pop star was interviewed on British television about his very public evangelical Christian faith. “What if,” the reporter asked…
Matthew 13 is about secrets. In this chapter, Jesus teaches eight parables and tells the disciples that they reveal the secrets of the kingdom (13:11). And much like Samson who both tells riddles and is himself a riddle that the reader must solve, so Jesus not only tells secrets but…
Click HERE for part One. THE TEXT AS TABERNACLE Creation – Initiation – Genesis (1 Samuel 17:1-11) The gathered armies not only remind the reader of Ebal and Gerizim, but also of the very reason that Israel was established (Creation) , set apart from the other nations by the circumcision…
What to do with Job’s Final “Friend,” Elihu Elihu is a strange character, at least in the sense of how and where he appears in the book of Job. Why does he not appear with the other three “friends?” Does his argument differ from any of the first three who…
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Gracia’s own suggestion is that we can make sense of the determinateness and indeterminateness of meaning by distinguishing between “essential” and “accidental” meanings: “although texts may have a well-delimited core of meaning (an essential meaning), they may have other meanings that are the result of contingent conditions, such as changes…
In the entry on meaning in the Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible (Baker), Jorge Gracia responds to the view that textual meaning has no limits with this: It is true that “texts are understood by different persons, or even by the same person at different times, to mean…
Joel Garver writes, in response to several posts from Raymond Tallis’s Not Saussure : “Most post-structuralist authors I’ve read aren’t dealing with things such as cups or trees or rocks, but rather things such as rationality, madness, criminality, virtue, etc. Foucault, for instance, seems to take bodies as ontologically basic,…
Fisch yet again: After reviewing the influence of the Old Testament, especially the Psalms, on prose writing in the seventeenth century, he adds: “it is worth bearing in mind that this is not only a matter of the seventeenth century. It is found earlier in the antiphonal plain-song of the…
Fisch again: Hebraic prose is different from the grand style of the sixteenth century, and different too from the pared-down plain style shared by many Puritans and all Baconians. It is a rhetoric, not an anti-rhetoric, but it is a rhetoric purified by Puritanism, Senecanism, and scientism. It is biblical…
In his 1964 book, Jerusalem and Albion: The Hebraic Factor in Seventeenth-Century Literature , Harold Fisch argues that Blake provides a more insightful and broader account of the seventeenth century’s “dissociation of sensibility” than Eliot, who coined the phrase. For Blake, the great crisis of England was the dissociation of…
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