Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The Paradosis Center at John Brown University in Siloam Spring, Arkansas, put on its first conference last week, it was a remarkable event. It was an ecumenical conference including Orthodox (John Behr, Edith Humphrey, others), Catholic (Rusty Reno, Michael Root, others), and Evangelical (Timothy George, David Lyle Jeffrey). Unusually for…
Naphtali Meshel observes in his new The "Grammar" of Sacrifice that scholars have been talking for decades about the "grammatical" character of ritual and sacrifice in general, but have never actually analyzed a specific ritual or sacrificial system grammatically. Some even talk about a "universal grammar" of sacrifice "even though…
Some Christians are rather breezy about the problem of evil. We shouldn't be. Do I need to remind you of the grisly beheadings that have taken place over the past few weeks? Do I need to remind you of the blood of innocents that’s been spilled in our own country?…
Have you ever been to a wedding where the heavens opened and a voice declared the couple “husband and wife”? Few of us have. Beautiful as they are, most marriages are quite mundane. Yet when Jesus talks about marriage, He describes it as something that God does: “What God has…
Jesus is the last and greatest of the Prophets. He is the Prophet that Moses predicted (Deuteronomy 18). That means He gives the final word, brings the blueprints for the final temple, speaks the final world into existence, and has complete and permanent access to the divine court, where He…
Paul stands against those who are “troubling” or “disturbing” the Galatians churches ( tarasso ; 1:7; also in 5:10). The reference seems to be two great troublers from the Old Testament. First, Achan is described as a “troubler” for the problems he causes in the aftermath of the battle at…
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Citing a still-unknown Greek writer, Kant shrewdly said, “War . . . creates more evil men than it takes away.”
Citing a still-unknown Greek writer, Kant shrewdly said, “War . . . creates more evil men than it takes away.”
In a reduction worthy of Nietzsche (or Augustine), Kant explores the motives behind honor: “the perpetual war between the Arathapescaw Indians and the Dog Rib Indians has no other aim than mere slaughter. In the savages’ opinion, bravery in war is the highest virtue. In the civilized state too, bravery…
Kant’s theory of radical evil, which he develops in the first part of Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone , rests on a number of basic assumptions. 1) Man is free, and his moral actions are undetermined by anything outside himself or even by anything within himself other than…
Robert Solomon offers a helpful fairly traditional summary of Kant’s philosophy in his little book on Continental Philosophy. Kant’s overall agenda, Solomon says, was (in Kant’s own words) to “deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.” Much as he admired the advances of post-Newtonian science, he worried that…
One of Kant’s central contributions to philosophy was the invention of the notion of “critical philosophy,” which means epistemology, which means philosophy as a critique of knowledge. Philosophy is the queen of the sciences that polices the borders between sciences and keeps everyone safely in his or her own department.…
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