Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Some readers of my essay, “ Strange and Glorious New Rites ,” have written to object that I have strained a gnat and swallowed a camel. I have strained out the gnat of a possible link to the memorial bread of the minchah (Lev. 2), while overlooking the camel that…
In his lectures on Comparative Religion, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy points to five fundamental gods that were over ancient man and still can dominate us today, and which must be respected. When we sin, we respect these gods more than we respect the Creator, disobeying the First Word: “You will have no…
A. Israel’s failure to hold land against the Canaanites. Progressive compromise, leading to judgment. 1:1–2:5. B. Israel’s idolatry, the cycle of judges, and war as God’s chastisement. 2:6–3:6. C. Northern Gentiles (Mesopotamia), and Othniel. 3:7-11. D. Lot: Moab, and Ehud. 3:12-13. E. Minor judge: Shamgar. 3:31. F. Canaanites opposed. Women…
The great question for the emerging East, for Asia and other awakening third world areas, for an emerging nation like China is, “what fate awaits them?” They are now emerging from an analogous paganism that the West emerged from centuries ago. Here an amazing quotation from David Aikman, the Time…
Paul contends that with the death of Christ on the Cross, there was an overcoming of the Principalities and the Powers (Col. 2:15). A great deal has been written on this subject over the last 60 years. What was for a long time either ignored, or regarded by liberal scholars…
One of the odd customs that has arisen in the 20th century is that many evangelical churches warp the rites of the Lord’s Supper by insisting that everyone wait so that they eat and drink together. Supposedly this is to emphasize the unity of the Church. This practice has no…
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Why should there be a final judgment when God judges in time? Aquinas answers: “Judgment on something changeable cannot be rendered fully before its consummation. Thus judgment cannot be rendered fully regarding the quality of any action before its completion, both in itself and its results, because many actions appear…
1) Verse 4 moves from the affliction of the apostles (“our”) to the comfort of “those who are in any affliction.” This movement does not depend on any similarity or identity between the affliction of the apostles and the affliction of other sufferers (though cf. v. 6b). Members of the…
A few notes on Descartes, Meditations 1-2, with lots of help from Jean-Luc Marion. Descartes’s ego cogito, ergo sum is not, Marion points out, original, at least in its form. It has origins in Augustine, who offered this response to the skeptics: “I have no fear of the arguments of…
Some scattered thoughts inspired by comments from Chris Schlect and Doug Wilson at a faculty discussion of de Lubac today: How is it that theologians (like Norman Shepherd, Steve Wilkins, Rich Lusk, and others) who want to expunge the notion of merit from theology get accused of being “neo-nomians” and…
Milbank asks the intriguing question of whether de Lubac’s surnaturel thesis “rather deconstructs the terms of the Schleiermacher/Barth divide.” He appears to mean that the polarization of Schleiermacher’s “intrinicism” and Barth’s “extrinicisim” is dissolved by de Lubac’s Thomist understand of nature and grace. To adopt, for the moment, an idiom…
Milbank contrasts de Lubac’s advocacy of patristic and medieval hermeneutics, which insists that the allegorical fulfills and completes the literal, with the Yale school, which he sees as living in “the no-man’s land of ‘history-like narrative’ which at once abolishes real history and ignores the essential allegorical underpinning of Christian…
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