Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
1 Chronicles 9:1 seems to bring the genealogies of 1 Chronicles to an end. The Chronicler has recorded the genealogy of the human race from Adam, focusing on the descendants of Abraham through Jacob. Summing it all up, he says, “So all Israel was enrolled by genealogies; and behold, they…
The “personalist” understanding of the Trinity, articulated most influentially in the work of John Zizioulas, has fallen on hard times. Recent scholars have attacked Zizioulas’s idea that Cappadocian Trinitarianism represented an ontological revolution, hammering on the distinction between divine and human personhood. Michel Barnes’s conclusion is the most drastic of…
Biblical Theology is often defined as the historical unfolding of God’s revelation, or of God’s revelation and of the history of his covenantal redemption and transformation of humanity and the world. In practice, Biblical Theology is usually broader than this, and also includes the study of literary structure and of…
We are made to be happy. Created to enter into the eternal joy of God, our whole being inclines to that end, but the fallen world has put forth barriers and by our own sin we bar ourselves from that endless delight, and death blinds us to that reality. Yet…
At the end of Revelation, John sees the heavenly city descending to earth. The city shines with the brilliance of God's glory, which lightens the nations, so that kings bring their glory to the city. This is not a vision of the final new heaven and new earth. It's a…
“No one has ever seen God,” writes John (John 1:18). If this is the case, then how can we speak about God? Some people say we actually cannot. Or at least we cannot speak about God positively, i.e. who He is. We can only say who or what God is…
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In their editorial introduction to Globalizing the Sacred , Manual Vasquez and Marie Marquardt explain the limitations of secularization theory. Some secularization theorists, recognizing that the theory's universal claims have proven false, put forward a qualified secularization theory. Though secularization as such doesn't explain the progress of modernity, modernity does…
In a 2003 essay on Terrence Malick's film, Days of Heaven , Hubert Cohen traces the Edenic motifs in Malick's various films. At the beginning of The Thin Red Line , “Private Witt (Jim Caviezel) . . . is AWOL and living in a Melanesian community that he stubbornly insists…
In a recent Theopolis lecture, James Jordan pointed to the symmetry between the beginning and end of the Mosaic era. As soon as the tabernacle is set up, Aaron's two sons, Nadab and Abihu, offer foreign fire before the Lord and are killed. At the end of the Mosaic era,…
In a recent New Yorker piece on “ Omission ,” John McPhee puts in a word for concise writing. Inevitably, he quotes Hemingway: “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is…
Josh Timmermann suggests that Terrence Malick's To the Wonder takes its cues not from love stories but from love songs - one in particular, the Song of Songs: “Its narrative logic is specifically poetic. Its structure is built carefully upon a cadence of clear, beautiful rhymes and faint yet significant…
The Federal District court in the Kim Davis case concluded that requiring her to sign same-sex marriage licenses didn't violate her free exercise of religion. She still could do all those quaint things that religious people do: “Davis remains free to practice her Apostolic Christian beliefs. She may continue to…
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