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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I n a scathing essay Trump and his New Nationalist supporters, Daniel Krauthammer observes that Trump defines national “greatness” as “winning”: “That was what his whole campaign was based on. His language is never about political ideals; it is about defeating opponents, being better than the other guy— win ,…
J ustice does not, David Hume argued, arise from judges with a rigorous concern for equity. It arises, like other social goods, from the mysterious harmonization of self-interested actions: “as the self-love of one person is naturally contrary to that of another, these several interested passions are obliged to adjust…
N ear the beginning of Value in Capitalist Society , Paul Cobben is explaining Marx's use of Hegelian themes and turns of argument when he summarizes Hegel's notion of Perception, a level of knowing beyond “Sense Certainty.” Cobben writes: Perception does not assume to have immediate knowledge of objective reality.…
S olomon is a builder. The verb banah (build) is used 31 times in the Chronicler's account of Solomon, mostly with reference to the construction of the temple. Chapter 8, though, uses the verb 8 times, mainly to refer to building projects other than the temple. After twenty years of…
O liver O'Donovan takes note of the power of the church's prophetic word. That's sexy. It's not so sexy to be reminded that “the church's speech is also prayer, speech addressed to God, from whom it originated, from the whole body on behalf of each charism in it” ( Desire…
R ummaging around John McGuckin's magisterial, encyclopedic, and very big history of the first millennium of Christianity, The Path of Christianity , uncovers some delightfully unexpected treasures. In chapter 7, he examines the reasons for the focus on Greek and Latin Christianity, and laments that “the non-Greek and non-Latin Christianities…
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