Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
For many people Christmas comes on December 25 and is over December 26. The tree is taken down along with the lights and the other decorations, and everyone begins setting the house in order for the new year. No more Christmas hymns. No more celebrations (well, until New Year’s Eve).…
The Ascension and the Incarnation should not be disconnected in our Christmas thinking or celebrations. As N.T. Wright notes, the ascension is "a central and vital feature without which all sorts of other things start to go demonstrably wrong. . . . where the ascension has been ignored or misunderstood,…
“In the Word was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness.” Thus John describes the incarnation of the Son. He comes as the living and life-giving light of the world. That’s good news. In the beginning, God spoke and light shone…
Christmas is all about Jesus. The angels announce Jesus’ birth, shepherds and wise men come to see Jesus, Herod wants to kill Jesus. We occasionally think of the Father who sent the Son, but we keep returning to the Son made flesh in Bethlehem’s manger. Meanwhile, as always, the Spirit…
Christmas is about many things, but one of the chief things revealed in the gospel of Christmas is the humility of God. We don't often think of humility as an attribute of God. If God is glorious and exalted, we think, He must be haughty and proud and self-centered. We…
John famously begins his Gospel with a piece of theology: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Matthew starts with a genealogy. John celebrates Advent with a hymn, Matthew with a list. For John, Jesus is the Word of creation…
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The following is an excerpt from Against Christianity, published in 2003. It seems more relevant today, in the age of Trumpism, than it did when I wrote it. Much popular Christian history operates in what may be called a “Eusebian” mode, treating America as the culmination of redemptive history. Eusebius…
Jean Baechler ( The Origins of Capitalism ) doesn't buy any of Marx's various accounts of the rise of capitalism. In every permutation, Marx's theory of the "original of the capitalism system presupposes the capitalist system" (25). Baechler continues: "To express myself in Platonic terms, I would say that the…
A number of things are called "most holy" ( qodesh qadashim ) in the Old Testament. Various sanctuary furnishings are "most holy" - the altar of ascensions (Exodus 29:37), the altar of incense (Exodus 30:10), the tent, the ark, the table of showbread, the lampstand, the laver (Exodus 30:29), incense…
Writing in the 1670s, Pierre Nicole turned the pessimistic anthropology of Jansenism into an apology for liberal order. "Men," he wrote, "being devoid of charity out of the derailment of sin, remain none the less filled with needs and are dependent on one another in countless ways." How can these…
Jean-Claude Michea ( Realm of Lesser Evil ) traces the unconscious roots of liberalism. Liberal egotism is the uneducated egotism of infants, who "desire to be all-powerful" (118) and express "boundless rage" (119; quoting Christopher Lasch) against anyone who fails to gratify. If parents fail the in task of "primary"…
A few discarded snippets from a review of Rosenstock-Huessy's Sociology, Volume 1 . Sociologists, Rosenstock-Huessy charges, often formulate their theories in this fashion: “an obscure Force A and a Relation B . . . affect Mr Y.” If sociologists are going to deal with reality itself, they need to take…
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