Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I grew up in the 1950s. This was before the "Sixties" and the democratization, informalization, and general cheapening of the church and her worship. Ministers were Father Donovan, Pastor Eckhart, Reverend MacPherson, Mister (Episcopal) Parker, and Brother Smith. Liturgical speech was high language, sounding kind of like the King James…
Metaphor exerts a surprisingly powerful influence within our thinking. Although it is easily dismissed as little more than a figure of speech, when we attend more closely to the ways in which we use it, metaphor’s importance swiftly becomes more apparent. Although many of our metaphors have become quite invisible…
What is a tree, scientifically speaking? A mere googling gives the following answer: “a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground.” We can increase detail by describing its family, genus, species and…
The majority of Western evangelical Christians rarely, if ever, fast as a form of spiritual discipline. In our culture, fasting is more connected with dieting than worship, the other side of our deeply ambiguous fascination with food. Food is everywhere. We eat more than ever before, at greater speed, and…
A Grammar of Creation An understanding of the visual-musical language of the Bible must begin with Genesis 1. This is fortunate, because when explaining biblical types to academics, as opposed to children, one is repeatedly forced to start from scratch. From birth, a healthy child is attuned to rhythm and…
In an inverse Eden, a land laid waste, one works alone tending the trash. There are none like him in all the earth, inquisitive, playful and most drawn to those mysterious, dancing bipedal creatures who lost earth and left it to go wandering the vast wilderness of space. Humans have…
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In his 2005 Christmas encyclical, Deus caritas est , Benedict XVI explains why love has to be understood as both eros and agape , as ascending and descending love. He notes early on that the Bible rarely uses the word eros , arguing that “the tendency to avoid the word…
Proverbs concludes with the portrait of the “excellent wife” (31:10). The portrait reaches back to the beginning of Proverbs and the portrait of wisdom. Like Lady Wisdom, the excellent wife’s value is far above jewels (v. 10; cf. 3:15; 8:11). Like Lady Wisdom, the excellent wife offers food (31:15; cf.…
Today, many Reformed theologians are advocates of "classical theism." A few hints from Richard Muller's volume on the Trinity raise the question of whether the Reformed tradition fits neatly into what passes as classical theism today. A few brief gleanings will suffice to raise the issue. Classical theists insist above…
Kendal Soulen ( The Divine Names and the Holy Trinity , 97) summarizes Barth's treatment of the implicit Trinitarianism of the Old Testament: "the Old testament testifies to Yahweh in three distinct ways. 'Yahweh' refers 'a first time' to the unseen God who is invisibly enthroned over all things, who…
In an insightful piece on " wokeness as myth ," Alan Jacobs points to a brief blog post in which Timothy Burke describes Trump as a "desecration": "Trump is the Piss Christ of liberals and leftists. His every breath is a bb-gun shot through a cathedral window, bacon on the…
Fergus Kerr, explicating Thomas's understanding of divine simplicity, acknowledges that "The doctrine of divine simpleness seems to make God so utterly different from anything created - so 'totally otherwise' - that any claim to have knowledge of God would be ruled out on the grounds that that which is 'simple'…
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