Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Along His journey to Jerusalem, Jesus stops frequently to have meals, three times with Pharisees (7:37-50; 11:37-54; 14:1-35). Meals were central to Jesus’ ministry. He comes “eating and drinking” (Luke 7:34). While His meals are not just for refreshment, they are opportunities for teaching the protocols of the kingdom. Meals…
Time as a realm of participation can be difficult for us imaginatively to grasp. While music is a profoundly temporal art, exploring the medium of time like no other, most of our temporal experience seems decidedly unmusical in character, disjointed and unorchestrated. The form in which we naturally discover time…
John devotes much attention to Jesus’ burial clothes. He tells us that Nicodemus brought about a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes to spice Jesus body, and that He was bound in linen wrappings. We find out that His body and His head were wrapped separately. (John 19:39-40; 20:6-7). When…
Thinking about time in terms of music also helps us to appreciate its unity and inner relations. Henri Bergson observes our cultural habit of dividing time into discrete moments, and conceiving of these as if akin to objects in a spatial succession. [1] Against such a notion, Bergson argues for…
As we attend to these and other aspects of music’s temporality, Begbie suggests, we will find means by which to resist some of our habitual modern ways of conceptualizing time, most especially our tendency to conceive of time as if it were a homogeneous set of technologically quantifiable units laid…
The Hidden Dimension In many fields of scientific study, the apparent complications and contradictions are dispelled once the internal logic is perceived. Biblical hermeneutics is no different, since the author of Creation is the Author of the Word. The Bible’s literary labyrinth radiates organically from an algorithm so simple it…
Showing page 133 of 309
Showing page 35 of 43
Summing up a survey of the Bible’s use of combat myths, Jon Levenson ( Creation and the Persistence of Evil , 24) says: “God’s visible victory over the enemies of order is in the past. The present is bereft of the signs of divine triumph. It is a formidable challenge…
“Modern medicine works very well,” says Rupert Sheldrake ( The Science Delusion , 260-1), especially “with mechanical aspects of the body, like defective joints, decayed teeth, faulty heart valves and blocked arteries, or infections curable with antibiotics.” But it has “tunnel vision” since it focuses all its attention to physical…
Jesus’ cry of dereliction (Calvin, Institutes , 2.16.11) expressed His feeling that he was “forsaken and estranged from God” and that all His cries were unheard. It was “as if God himself had plotted [His] ruin.” Calvin adds, though, that God was not in fact angry with Jesus: “we do…
Calvin ( Institutes 2.16.2-4) works to reconcile the Bible’s double testimony about God’s attitude toward sinners. On the one hand, God redeems His enemies; on the other hand, this redemption comes out of God. He resolves by saying that while we all “have in ourselves something deserving of God’s hatred,”…
In explaining the name “Jesus,” Calvin ( Institutes 2.16.1) makes this curious statement: “The office of Redeemer was laid upon him that he might be our Savior. Still, our redemption would be imperfect if he did not lead us ever onward to the final goal of salvation.” That distinction of…
Sex expresses love, but John Paul II argues that more needs to be said ( Love and Responsibility ). After all, “There may be affection between people who are not sexually attracted to each other.” That suggests that “it is not love of man and woman that determines the proper…
Showing page 761 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
