Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Summary In what follows, I will consider the “year-stamps” employed in Scripture, i.e., statements of the form, “Such-and-such an event took place in the Xth year of Y.” In the process, I will suggest some ways in which the Biblical narrative might relate to events in the extra-Biblical world, though…
In the first essay on the parable of the Prodigal Son, I suggested that the problems commentators and others encounter in interpreting Jesus three-part parable are not accidental. These are not just problems in our ignorance of cultural background. They are intentional features of the stories —stories designed to poke…
The story of the Prodigal Son is perhaps the most well-known story in the Bible. As others have observed, it may also be one of the most misunderstood. In two short essays, I will point out features of this story that are commonly neglected, aspects of Jesus’ parable that might…
The parable of Lazarus and the nameless rich man is not an independent story. It is part of a long context that begins in Luke 15:1, where Jesus is eating with tax collectors and sinners and the scribes and Pharisees grumble. In response to their hardheartedness, Jesus tells a three-part…
The Bible is written so that even when a reader cannot pick up on what might be deeper or more detailed aspects of a text, there is virtually always a message to be heard. In the ancient world, where the “reader” of Scripture would likely be a church official facing…
The distinction between garden (or vineyard) and field begins in Genesis 2. This relates to the ordering of the formless world. Plants of the field are contrasted with the garden planted by God in Genesis 2:5&8. Later on, under the Old Covenant the Israelites will be required to keep their…
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Rosenstock-Huessy strikingly sees the spirit of Francis in the person of Abraham Lincoln: “When Lincoln, as President and Commander-in-Chief of a victorious army, walked into Richmond in 1865, on foot, without escort, St. Francis had conquered the powers of this earth. In Siberia, in Egypt, people would whisper that old…
Natalie Zelmon Davis writes, “In a profound sense, the religious reformations of the sixteenth century were a quarrel about gifts, that is, about whether humans can reciprocate to God, about whether humans can put God under obligation, and about what this means for what people should give to each other.”
Few areas of theology have been as ridiculed in modern times as eschatology. Antichrists, dragons, beasts, final judgments - it’s all superlatively mythological for modern rationalists. Sometime in the early part of the twentieth century, however, New Testament scholars began rediscovering the centrality of eschatology in NT theology. For some,…
Discussing the separation of workplace and home, Rosenstock-Huessy makes the striking observation that this divide separates labor from a man’s “right to teach, once the supreme value of a master’s earthly life.”
The Protestant Reformation had well-known effects on the nuclear family, but Rosenstock-Huessy notes that a parallel movement occurred in the Roman Catholic church after 1500, when Catholics began to “lay far more stress on the cult of St. Joseph and on the conception of the Holy Family.” As a result,…
In The Christian Future , Rosenstock-Huessy again makes some passing comments about childbirth. He is talking about the character of suburban life, its ethnic and economic uniformity, its placid and indifferent external peacefulness that hides, he claims, desperate inner conflicts. For Rosenstock-Huessy, the whole situation is summarized by the fact…
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