Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
“What’s the fastest route” he asks me as we quickly come to a stop behind a sea of red brake lights. I pull out my phone and map all the options. Every way is red with traffic backed up. Deep down I must be a small town girl because traffic…
Dear Friend of Theopolis, I have signed a stack of documents in the years since we started Theopolis, but my heart jumped a few beats as I looked at the thick lease contract. “This is real,” I thought. “This makes it really real.” Theopolis has been real for nearly three…
In the Edenic world of Perelandra, from C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, Ransom notices something about how the Green Lady treats the animals: [1] “There was in her face an authority, in her caresses a condescension, [2] which by taking seriously the inferiority of her adorers made them somehow less inferior…
In my previous two articles, I argued for the significance of the fact that baptism addresses our bodies in their objectivity. In the body, the self has an existence that runs deeper than our consciousness, decision, self-expression, and action. In washing our passive bodies, baptism seals us with an anticipatory…
Judah is a sinful nation, weighed down with iniquity. They are not the seed of Abraham, but the seed of iniquity. Their worship is abominable to Yahweh, because their hands are covered with innocent blood. They have not done good, or sought justice, or reproved the ruthless, or defended the…
Although we tend to define ourselves by our subjectivity —our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, decisions, actions—we are frequently forgetful of the objectivity of the self as body, the reality of the self that underlies and precedes all of our subjectivity. The body is the site of our ‘givenness’, where we are…
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If the writer must be open to the manifestation of God in “what-is,” she must begin with the senses. Following Aquinas, Flannery O'Connor writes, “The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot…
C. E. Douglas's 1915 study of Revelation, The Mystery of the Kingdom , is an eccentric work in a number of ways, but for just that reason highly stimulating, provocative of insight. He rejects, for instance, both the “standard” dating of the book in the reign of Domitian (based on…
Jesus condemned the temple as a “den of thieves.” He was quoting Jeremiah, who said that the Jews of his time were using the temple as a “safe house” where they could store and enjoy their ill-gotten gains. The temple was not where their thieving took place, but their hideout.…
Yahweh is the “Holy One of Israel” ( qedosh yisrael ). It is a name used almost exclusively in Isaiah. It appears once in Kings (2 Kings 19:22), three times in the Psalms (71:22; 78:41; 89:18), a couple of times in Jeremiah. Isaiah uses the name twenty-five times (significant? 2…
Israelite kings were not to be like kings of the nations (Deuteronomy 17). Kings from the nations multiplied wealth and lived in luxury; they built military machines to conquer their neighbors; they kept harems full of princesses, wives and concubines that represented political alliances. Israel's kings were to be different…
Blame it on Marburg. The 1529 Colloquy at Marburg attempted to reconcile Lutherans and Zwinglians on the doctrine of the real presence, and was nearly able to achieve its aim. To Luther's surprise, the Zwinglian party agreed with fourteen of his fifteen propositions, and even conceded most of what was…
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