Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
It is a well-known movie trope, the sports car drives up, a stiletto-heeled starlet steps out and the camera follows her leg up the prodigious slit of her dress, then it takes in the rest of her figure before settling on her face, usually primed and puckered for some pro-feminist…
The “personalist” understanding of the Trinity, articulated most influentially in the work of John Zizioulas, has fallen on hard times. Recent scholars have attacked Zizioulas’s idea that Cappadocian Trinitarianism represented an ontological revolution, hammering again and again the distinction between divine and human personhood. Michel Barnes’s conclusion is the most…
I sit here in my office and poke around on a keyboard that is not even physically connected to my laptop and characters appear on a screen. I have a phone in my pocket through which I talk to someone around the world, send a text message, and to which…
I want to give a pep talk. Nothing fancy, nothing clever. Jesus makes some astounding promises in Luke 11. I want to clear out the clutter and convince you to believe Him and to act on it. The chapter begins with Jesus praying and teaching His disciples to pray by…
Eleonore Stump in her book Wandering in Darkness invites us to re-read the story of Lazarus (John 11) from Mary’s perspective. Stump argues that the story of Lazarus is a story of Mary, since both Lazarus and Martha are identified by their relationship with Mary. The true ending of the…
In his introduction to The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift in Honor of James B. Jordan , Peter Leithart says this about him: “Jordan is an unclassifiable thinker because he is an unclassifiable person . . . he closes his eyes in ecstasy listening to Messiaen or Rachmaninoff . .…
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Leviticus 1 tells us that Yahweh called Moses from the tent of meeting to deliver instructions about sacrifice. What is that "tent of meeting" ( 'ohel mo'ed )? Judging by the usage of Leviticus, it would seem to be the tabernacle or a portion of the tabernacle. Most of the…
The Ten Words include twelve negative commands. Most of the verbs that are negated are unique: 1) Thou shalt not have ( lo' yihyeh-leka ; literally, "there shalt not be to thee") other gods. 2) Thou shalt not prostrate ( lo'-tishtachweh ) to them (i.e., images). 3) Thou shalt not…
Thomas Aquinas summed up a long tradition when he said that philosophy is theology's ancilla , its maidservant. That's an apt description, and applies as well to natural science, social science, poetry, literary criticism, history, etc. etc. Philosophy has a special role only because her work often resembles theology's, and…
John Milbank currently has a series of essays on natural law running a Church Life Journal . It's a "revisionist" account of natural law. And one of the revisions is Milbank's post-Kantian conception of the relation of nature and culture, something he lays out in his essay, " Only Theology…
Steven Duby ( Divine Simplicity ) addresses the sort of argument I offered in yesterday's post . I quote a long paragraph (p. 148), with comments interspersed. "One might contend," Duby writes, "for a divine complexity that is necessary and irrevocable with no risk of divisibility. Such a hypothesis elicits…
This is a response to the notion of divine simplicity. It's not a refutation. It's an experiment designed to tease out the logic of the claim. Simplicity means that God is without parts. He has no physical parts, and He's not a composite of any metaphysical "parts" either. He's not…
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