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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For us, hospitality usually means entertaining. It means having our friends and neighbors and church members into the home. Sometimes, in our world, it involves jockeying for position and power by showing hospitality to the right kinds of people. That’s how the rich and famous create and sustain the aura…
The London Times fulminates: “It is quite sufficient to cast one’s eyes on the voluptuous intertwining of the limbs, and close compressure of the bodies, in this dance, to see that it is far indeed removed from the modest reserve which has hitherto been considered distinctive of English females. So…
Marilyn McCord Adams ( Christ and Horrors , Cambridge, 2006) proposes to demonstrate the coherence of Christology not by starting with sin and explaining how Christ has dealt with sin, but by starting with “horrors” and asking, What must Christ be and do if He is going to rescue us…
In her book on medieval Bible scholarship, Beryl Smalley notes that “Alexandrian exegesis penetrated to the Latin middle ages, when knowledge of Greek had declined, by two main channels: indirectly through the Latin Fathers and directly through translations of Origen’s works. Rufinus’ translations of some of his homilies were used…
Philo thought of allegory as a means for universalizing Jewish history and law, analogous to the way the Roman world had fused all peoples into a single empire. Literalists are “citizens of a petty state,” while allegorists are “on the roll of citizens of a greater country, namely, this whole…
Why did God create the world in six days? Philo said that 6 is the perfect number, both the sum and the product of its factors, which happen to be the first three integers (1, 2, 3). But there’s more: “We may say that [6] is in its nature both…
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