Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I grew up in the 1950s. This was before the "Sixties" and the democratization, informalization, and general cheapening of the church and her worship. Ministers were Father Donovan, Pastor Eckhart, Reverend MacPherson, Mister (Episcopal) Parker, and Brother Smith. Liturgical speech was high language, sounding kind of like the King James…
Metaphor exerts a surprisingly powerful influence within our thinking. Although it is easily dismissed as little more than a figure of speech, when we attend more closely to the ways in which we use it, metaphor’s importance swiftly becomes more apparent. Although many of our metaphors have become quite invisible…
What is a tree, scientifically speaking? A mere googling gives the following answer: “a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground.” We can increase detail by describing its family, genus, species and…
The majority of Western evangelical Christians rarely, if ever, fast as a form of spiritual discipline. In our culture, fasting is more connected with dieting than worship, the other side of our deeply ambiguous fascination with food. Food is everywhere. We eat more than ever before, at greater speed, and…
A Grammar of Creation An understanding of the visual-musical language of the Bible must begin with Genesis 1. This is fortunate, because when explaining biblical types to academics, as opposed to children, one is repeatedly forced to start from scratch. From birth, a healthy child is attuned to rhythm and…
In an inverse Eden, a land laid waste, one works alone tending the trash. There are none like him in all the earth, inquisitive, playful and most drawn to those mysterious, dancing bipedal creatures who lost earth and left it to go wandering the vast wilderness of space. Humans have…
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The world enters our worship, it is brought into the King’s palace and made part of the King’s worship, so that it can be transformed, so that it can reach its telos . Worship is a microcosm, or, as Jordan puts it, a “microchron.” What is brought into worship? Our…
We often believe, Paul Griffiths writes ( Decreation , 162-4) that eros is “a drive or appetite internal to itself by means of which it relates itself to a world external to itself.” Not so. “The flesh's eros is received as git, not possessed as aspiration.” We become capable of…
In the first of his Hulsean lectures, Richard Hays claims ( Reading Backwards ) that “many ‘mainstream' Protestant churches today are . . . naively Marcionite in their theology and practice: in their worship services they have no OT reading, or if the OT is read it is rarely preached…
John sees great signs in heaven (Revelation 12:1-4). After sweeping the stars from the sky, the dragon stands ready to devour the child that the woman bears. To “stand before” another is a liturgical position. Priests stand before the Lord. That is the position of the dragon in relation to…
A GPS can locate a human being. The “glowing blue dot on the Google-mapped smartphone” shows where your phone is. But, Paul Griffiths ( Decreation ) argues, these devices cannot locate human flesh. Such devices work only as they treat your flesh as “inanimate body,” which is not what it…
Philip Jenkins's contribution to The Globalization of Christianity (edited by Gordon Heath and Steven Studebaker) offers sobering and exciting news by turns. On the sobering side, he describes the statistical stagnation of Christianity, and compares it to the spread of Islam. For the past century, Christianity has held steady at…
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