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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Jeffrey Burton Russell, who identifies himself as a “lapsed atheist,” has spent most of his career writing about Satan and hell. His most recent book is a history of the modern “mislaying” of heaven. Early in the book, he points out that “The ‘decline of heaven’ was linked to the…
In his “Hortatory Address,” Justin claims that Plato’s theory of forms came from a misreading of the tabernacle texts of Exodus: “And Plato, too, when he says that form is the third original principle next to God and matter, has manifestly received this suggestion from no other source than from…
In his “Hortatory Address,” Justin claims that Plato’s theory of forms came from a misreading of the tabernacle texts of Exodus: “And Plato, too, when he says that form is the third original principle next to God and matter, has manifestly received this suggestion from no other source than from…
As Hugo Rahner made clear in his classic study of the patristic uses of Greek myth, the church fathers saw Christ anticipated not only in the OT but in ancient literature and philosophy generally. Some examples: In Plato’s Republic (2, 361d-e), Glaucon describes the perfectly just man as one who…
In his “Hortatory Address to the Greeks,” Justin Martyr argued that the disagreements among Greek philosophers undermined their reliability, while the unity of the apostolic witness, and the witness of their successors, was evidence that Christianity came from God. “Since therefore it is impossible to learn anything true concerning religion…
In the aforementioned book, Magee enumerates the following parallels between Hegel and Hermeticism: 1. Hegel holds that God’s being involves “creation,” the subject matter of his Philosophy of Nature. Nature is a moment of God’s being. 2. Hegel holds that God is in some sense “completed” or actualized through the…
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