Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Mystical theologians are often unguarded, extreme, un-nuanced, pressing to the edges of heresy, sometimes beyond. Still, the mystics are worthy of study. Why? Many reasons. Unlike some late medieval and post-Reformation dogmaticians, mystical theologians are often instinctively and richly Trinitarian. Historical-critical approaches to Scripture left mystical theologians virtually untouched; mystics…
Portia of Belmont is a “lady richly left,” as Bassanio says of her in the first Act of The Merchant of Venice . Plus, she’s beautiful and wise. Suitors clamber to Belmont in hope. Her father knew it would be so, and in his will set up a fairy-tale test…
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In the nature of the case, “the” Christian meditation on Deuteronomy 14:1-21 cannot be written. Meditation offers too many possibilities, opens too many doors. There is not one and only one correct set of associations for a Christian to consider when thinking of Deuteronomy 14:1-21. We could, for example, consider…
Having retold the story of the cumulative sin of Israel leading to the great atonement on the cross, Paul then reemphasizes that, just as both Jew and Gentiles were locked into sin and judgment, now they are both justified by faith: Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded.…
Deuteronomy 14 is full of allusions to events of Israel’s history and other portions of Scripture. What would an Israelite learn by mediation on these allusions? The answer, I believe, is at least fourfold. Faith, Worship, War For the ancient Israelite first hearing Moses’ sermon, or perhaps hearing it read…
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As David Goldman sees, it , last week's fatal accident involving an Uber self-driving car is emblematic of our techno-Utopianism. "If the brain is merely a machine that white-coated lab techs can measure and manipulate like any other machine, and if machines can programmed to emulate the human brain, then…
Eric Cohen puts his finger on one of the glaring flaws of Patrick Deneen's recent Why Liberalism Failed . Deneen's is a strangely ahistorical account of liberalism: "Deneen treats American society as if it is simply a Lockean (or Madisonian) abstraction. For a book that celebrates the importance of particular…
Ahaz of Judah makes "molten images for the Baals" (2 Chronicles 28:2). He's the only king in Chronicles to do so. The term massekah is used only twice in Chronicles, once of Ahaz's making, the other of Josiah's destruction of molten things (2 Chronicles 34:3-4). The term reaches back to…
Alan Hayward ( Creation and Evolution ) summarizes some of the evidence for an old earth. Some lines of evidence are fairly powerful. He points to sandwich structures on the ocean floor: A base of hardened sediment with fossils, a layer of large coral reefs, an upper layer of sediment…
Lytton Strachey, famed as a member of the "Bloomsbury Group" and for his war against Victorian values, wrote to Leonard (husband of Virginia) Woolf in 1904: "I sometimes feel as if it were not only ourselves who are concerned, but that the destinies of the whole world are somehow involved…
By the Chronicler's lights, Ahaz is the worst king Judah ever has. He is the only king of whom it's explicitly said that he did " not do right" (2 Chronicles 28:1). That not-right is unpacked with six more verbs, making a full seven of wickedness. 1)Did not do right,…
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