Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Every advent of new media creates the justifiable reaction from some that the necessarily accompanied amputation may not be worth the extension made possible by the new tools. This is not unique to the Digital Age. Lamoignon Malesherbes, the French politician who was counsel for the defense of Louis XVI,…
A response to Gage Crowder's " The Hole in our Hope ?" Already, the first pages of the Bible promise a bright future. The story starts with the creation of heaven and earth, where heaven is perfect, but the earth is in a state of formless emptiness. Yet, God takes…
A rejoinder to Bubu Jarmulak's essay, " Embrace Pessimism ." Whereas calumnious critiques are reflections of more on the critic than the work criticized, good critiques are always opportunities for reassessment and improvement if they are received as such . Since its renaissance, the biblical doctrine of postmillennialism—or “optimistic eschatology,”…
Several decades ago, a pastor (and friend) mentioned in passing at one of our regular breakfasts together that he wasn’t satisfied with the usual reading of Jesus’s prayer in Gethsemane, the usual reading being that Jesus asked the Father to avoid the Cross at Gethsemane. We turned to the passage,…
On May 21, 1604, the cathedral of Toledo in Spain held job interviews for the post of choirmaster, the head of music at the church. The position had been vacated when the previous occupant, Alonso Lobo, was poached by the nearby cathedral of Seville, and Toledo needed a replacement who…
Imagine — counterfactually: on the night he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus held up an empty hand and said, ‘This is the blood of the covenant poured out for you. Drink of it.’ But there was no cup, no wine, nothing. If there’s no sign of the covenant, is there…
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H.A. Drake’s Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Ancient Society and History) is a remarkable piece of work. One of his opening moves is to show how, despite clear and overt differences, both Burckhardt’s pure-political Constantine and Baynes’s sincere-Christian Constantine share common assumptions about politics and religion. He…
Niebuhr has this nice harmonization of the Matthean and Lukan beatitude to the poor: “Both versions are necessary to catch the full flavor of the beatitude. For the Lukan version alone would make poverty a guarantee of virtue, particularly of the virtue of humility, which it is not. The Matthean…
Niebuhr claims that irony is inherent in the Christian view of history: Christianity’s “interpretation of the nature of evil in human history is consistently ironic. This consistency is achieved on the basis of the belief that the whole drama of human history is under the scrutiny of a divine judge…
Niebuhr ( Irony ) quotes an unnamed European statesman who expresses gratitude for America’s help in resisting tyranny, but fear “that we might become an American ally.” America’s idealism doesn’t reassure him: “The idealism does indeed prevent America from a gross abuse of its power. But it might well accentuate…
Charles Maier’s comparative study Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors reaches the waffly but accurate conclusion that the “United States reveals many, but not all - at least not yet - of the traits that distinguished empires.” Early on, he makes the helpful distinction between “being” and “having” an…
Van Dam ( Roman Revolution of Constantine ) suggests that Eusebius’s Life was simultaneously a political tract celebrating the elevation of a Christian emperor and a theological apology promoting Eusebius’s Christological subordinationism. The afterlife of Eusebius’s treatise, though, put the emperors in their place. Rufinus’s translation/paraphrase of Eusebius’s Church History…
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