Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Summary In what follows, I will consider the “year-stamps” employed in Scripture, i.e., statements of the form, “Such-and-such an event took place in the Xth year of Y.” In the process, I will suggest some ways in which the Biblical narrative might relate to events in the extra-Biblical world, though…
In the first essay on the parable of the Prodigal Son, I suggested that the problems commentators and others encounter in interpreting Jesus three-part parable are not accidental. These are not just problems in our ignorance of cultural background. They are intentional features of the stories —stories designed to poke…
The story of the Prodigal Son is perhaps the most well-known story in the Bible. As others have observed, it may also be one of the most misunderstood. In two short essays, I will point out features of this story that are commonly neglected, aspects of Jesus’ parable that might…
The parable of Lazarus and the nameless rich man is not an independent story. It is part of a long context that begins in Luke 15:1, where Jesus is eating with tax collectors and sinners and the scribes and Pharisees grumble. In response to their hardheartedness, Jesus tells a three-part…
The Bible is written so that even when a reader cannot pick up on what might be deeper or more detailed aspects of a text, there is virtually always a message to be heard. In the ancient world, where the “reader” of Scripture would likely be a church official facing…
The distinction between garden (or vineyard) and field begins in Genesis 2. This relates to the ordering of the formless world. Plants of the field are contrasted with the garden planted by God in Genesis 2:5&8. Later on, under the Old Covenant the Israelites will be required to keep their…
Showing page 77 of 309
Showing page 35 of 43
Feuerbach wrote that the Trinity “is the secret of the necessity of the ‘thou’ for an ‘I’; it is the truth that no being - be it man, God, mind or ego - is for itself alone a true, perfect, and absolute being, that truth and perfection are only the…
Nicholas Carr asks in the July/August issue of the Atlantic whether Google is making us stupid. He points out that the web tends to scatter attention and diffuse concentration by bringing information from various sources at us all at once. As the web comes to dominate our access to news…
Garrett Green ( Theology, Hermeneutics, and Imagination ) thinks that Feuerbach serves up raw what the masters of suspicion - Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud - cooked and covered with sauces. The fundamental objection to religion in Feuerbach, and in his successors, is the notion that “religion is the produce of…
In his introduction, Ganssle provides a lucid description of McTaggert’s A and B series (or theories) of time: “The B-theory holds that the most important thing about locating events in time is their relation to other events. So something happens before, after or at the same time as something else.…
I’ve just begun to look at Gregory Ganssle’s God and Time , but the index worries. In a book about time, there are no entries for “calendar” or “clock.” More worrying, there are only four dispersed references to the Trinity.
Richard Swinburne describes God’s omnipresence in these terms: “God is supposed to be able to move any part of the universe directly; he does not need to use one part of the universe to make another part move. He can make any part move as a basic action . .…
Showing page 1494 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
