Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The “second Reformation” introduced Reformed liturgy and teaching into Lutheran Germany. This was seen by some as a continuation of the Reformation and a purgation of Catholic remnants. The effort to carry on “further reformation” led to disputes with Lutherans. As Bodo Nischan has put it, the hottest debate in…
In J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century , Tom Shippey observes that Bilbo is a member of the middle class, a bourgeois. Bilbo does not have any servants, but his hole is “the home of a member of the Victorian upper-middle class of Tolkien’s nineteenth-century youth, full of…
Idolatry has deprived Israel of her senses. This was one of the early messages to Isaiah (Isaiah 6). Yahweh sent him out to a people who had been deprived of their senses because of their commitment to idols. They become like the idols they serve. They still have eyes, but…
In the current climate of Trinitarian discussion concerning personhood, it's good to reach back to David Bentley Hart's treatment of the subject in his wonderful Beauty of the Infinite . Hart addresses the dangers of misreading Rahner’s rule, namely, the danger of dissolving the ontological Trinity into the economic. In…
Chris Kou is the oldest son of Chinese immigrants. Chris and his brothers run a branding and marketing business, Imagineering, in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. In his spare time, he takes online courses from Reformed Theological Seminary, and aspires to be a pastor. Chris is also one of our…
The following was delivered as the Solemn Charge and Exhortation to Theopolis students beginning the Easter term course on Architecture and Liturgical Space . As we will be reminded repeatedly throughout the week, the Bible has a lot to say about building and buildings. Long stretches of Exodus, Kings, Chronicles,…
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In his book on the hermeticist Hegel, Magee gives this helpful sketch of the differences between gnosticism and hermeticism: “Gnosticism and Hermeticism both believe that a divine ‘spark’ is implanted in man, and that man can come to know God. However, Gnosticism involves an absolutely negative account of creation. It…
In a 2001 book (Cornell), Glenn Magee argues that Hegel must be understood as a hermetic thinker. Hegel claims to have moved beyond the ancient notion of philosophy as “pursuit of wisdom” to an absolute knowledge that is simply identical with wisdom. As Magee says, “Hegel’s claim to have attained…
In After Virtue , Alasdair MacIntyre provides a neat discussion of the virtue and selfhood in Greek antiquity. The unity of ARETE, virtue, “resides . . . in the concept of that which enables a man to discharge his role,” and refers to “excellence of any kind,” whether in a…
One Marc Cohen of the University of Washington, offers this account of the “logos” of Heraclitus in an online lecture outline: First, “There is an orderly, law-governed process of change in the universe. (Compare fragment 80 with Anaximander, who equates strife with injustice; for Heraclitus, strife is justice, and is…
Some selections from Diogenes Laertius’ “Life of Heraclitus, from his “Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers: “He was above all men of a lofty and arrogant spirit, as is plain from his writings, in which he says, ‘Abundant learning does not form the mind; for if it did, it would…
Seigel devotes a fascinating section of his book ( Idea of the Self ) to a summary of Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees , in which Mandeville describes what Kant characterized as the “asocial sociability” of human nature. Social in the sense that even in a natural state, prior to…
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