Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In a brief article entitled, “The Theology of Old Testament Sacrifice," Gordon Wenham, expanding on a comment about ritual from anthropologist Monica Wilson, states: We resort to ritual when we want to express our deepest feelings. Consider the rituals used in greeting people in our society: a nod, a handshake,…
Everyone here in Cambridge is talking about sacrifice. My supervisor, Dr. John Milbank, is working on a book on gift in which he is dealing with recent literature on sacrifice. The graduate seminar in Systematics during Michaelmas Term focused on the theme of sacrifice. The first presenter was Dr. Ian…
Protestant-Catholic debates about the sacraments have usually taken the form of debates about sacramental efficacy. Protestants claim that Catholics believe that sacraments work ex opere operato , virtually a magical view of the sacraments. A priest goes through the motions and says the hocus-pocus and "presto!" the sacraments confer grace.…
When Israel came out of Egypt, she was a collection of tribes descended from the Tribe of Abraham. Tribalism drops out of history into the "world" by looking back to ancestors and by orienting to the spirits that govern the world. The world must not be manipulated, because to do…
Angels are the mediators of the Old Creation, as Eugenio Corsini has rightly pointed out in his commentary, The Apocalypse. For this reason, argues Corsini, the book of Revelation must have to do with the final end of the Old Creation order, which he associates with the work of Jesus…
Our procedure in "Through New Eyes Volume 2" thus far has been to lay out the general overview of history and its meaning as the Bible presents it. My hope is to fill this out in four major sections, corresponding to the four ages and the four testaments in the…
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It sure seems that the story of Joseph is a typological foreshadowing of the life of Jesus. Joseph is hated by his brothers; turned over to Gentiles; falsely accused; thrown into pit and prison; raised up, finally set on a throne, from which he gathers and distributes bread. Of course,…
Jock Young ( Vertigo of Late Modernity ) discerns two sorts of “othering” in contemporary life: “the first is a conservative demonisation which projects negative attributes on the other and thereby grants positive attributes to oneself The second, very common yet rarely recognised, is a liberal othering where the other…
In several dense paragraphs in The Fragmented World of the Social , Axel Honneth describes the Gyorgy Lukacs's analysis of the fragmentation caused by capitalist society and the romantic reaction. There is, for starters, the fragmentation of the human being himself, induced by the capitalist separation of the worker from…
In his little book, Alone Again , Zygmunt Bauman summarizes his characteristic themes: We live in a liquid world, nothing permanent, nothing solid, nothing predictable. Typically pungent, Bauman points to “the overall tendency to dismantle, deregulate and dissipate the once solid and relatively lasting frames in which the concerns and…
Jeremiah 46 is an oracle against Egypt, which, like Judah, is threatened by the advancing forces of Babylon. In the space of four verses (20-23), Jeremiah runs through a dizzying series of metaphors. Egypt is a pretty heifer (v. 20), and Nebuchadnezzar's army is a “horsefly” that is going to…
The late Jock Young observes in his Vertigo of Late Modernity that our period is characterized by “a combination of factors, some long existing yet unique in their combination, others pre-existent yet transformed in the present period. The impact revolves around three axes, the disembeddedness of everyday life, the awareness…
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