Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Understanding Shakespeare’s Biblical references is vital for the interpretation of many, if not all, of Shakespeare’s plays. For Othello , it is especially important, not only because the interpretation of the play is contested among various approaches — feminist, homosexual, post-colonial, Marxist, Freudian, new historical, and others — but also…
Mike Allen of Reformed Theological Seminary, Orlando, scores some points in his review of The End of Protestantism . He lodges the fair complaint that my rhetoric sometimes outruns my evidence. He argues that more stress on the present reality of the church’s unity deepens the tragedy of division; divisions…
I begin with two observations. First, on any millennial view, the Christian account of history is progressive, moving from the garden to the city. It is eschatological not only in that there is an end, but that the end is a glorified beginning, not merely a return to origins. To…
The church is a new form of polity that erupts into the world as much as the Son of God comes into the world. It’s a real-world political alternative to the polities of the ancient world. It resolves many of the political dilemmas of the ancient world, though not simply…
In my last post , I explained how Baptists really have a “one-ordinance-one sacrament” ecclesiology. I said this: “what Baptists really believe, in modern parlance, is that there is one ordinance (baptism which is a sign or symbol only) and one sacrament (the Lord’s Supper in which feeding upon Jesus…
One of the most extensive and penetrating responses to the Yoder-Hauerwas attack on Constantiniansm is found in Oliver O’Donovan’s Desire of Nations , in a chapter entitled “The Obedience of Rulers.” O’Donovan defines the word “Christendom” as “a historical idea,” specifically “the idea of a professedly Christian secular political order,…
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Though the presence of Christ has been central to Eucharistic theology, Thomas O'Loughlin ( The Eucharist ) argues that in Tridentine Catholicism”the dominant thinking about the event of physical engagement with the Eucharist was imagined in terms of a sacred commodity. The priest ‘confected' the Eucharist, it was reserved for…
Early in his Forgiveness in Victorian Literature , Richard Gibson quotes Sarah Beckwith's observation that “promising and forgiving [are] acts of making community” (27). Gibson draws on Hannah Arendt's analysis to fill out the picture. Promises reduce the unpredictability of the future, while “forgiveness confronts the crisis of the past.…
Margaret Doody's Jane Austen's Names is a treasure chest. On the assumption that “an artist cannot do anything slovenly,” Doody explores the historical significance of the real place names that appear in Austen's novels, teases out the puns in the characters' names, suggests that Austen was sensitive to the ethnic…
Key terms of ancient philosophy are rare or entirely absent in the New Testament. Aristotle considered the study of causes ( aitia ) and principles ( archai ) to be the subject matter of first philosophy ( Metaphysics A.1,981b28), and he defines metaphysics as the study “of the things which…
Norberto Bobbio ( Left and Right ) claims that left and right are different because of their different evaluations of equality. He starts from the uncontroversial fact that people are equal in certain respects, unequal in others, and claims that “We can then correctly define as egalitarians those who ,…
John Rawls's notion of “difference principle” is an alternative to a meritocratic regime, but it is also different from equality of result. As Michael Sandell explains in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice , Rawls denies that the difference principle eliminates distinctions between persons. The difference principle aims at the…
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