Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
For many people Christmas comes on December 25 and is over December 26. The tree is taken down along with the lights and the other decorations, and everyone begins setting the house in order for the new year. No more Christmas hymns. No more celebrations (well, until New Year’s Eve).…
The Ascension and the Incarnation should not be disconnected in our Christmas thinking or celebrations. As N.T. Wright notes, the ascension is "a central and vital feature without which all sorts of other things start to go demonstrably wrong. . . . where the ascension has been ignored or misunderstood,…
“In the Word was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness.” Thus John describes the incarnation of the Son. He comes as the living and life-giving light of the world. That’s good news. In the beginning, God spoke and light shone…
Christmas is all about Jesus. The angels announce Jesus’ birth, shepherds and wise men come to see Jesus, Herod wants to kill Jesus. We occasionally think of the Father who sent the Son, but we keep returning to the Son made flesh in Bethlehem’s manger. Meanwhile, as always, the Spirit…
Christmas is about many things, but one of the chief things revealed in the gospel of Christmas is the humility of God. We don't often think of humility as an attribute of God. If God is glorious and exalted, we think, He must be haughty and proud and self-centered. We…
John famously begins his Gospel with a piece of theology: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Matthew starts with a genealogy. John celebrates Advent with a hymn, Matthew with a list. For John, Jesus is the Word of creation…
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At least since the Reformation, the choices on the meaning of justification have been two: Either justification is a declaration of right standing or it’s a making-righteous (as in Bonaventure’s claim that the grace of justification purifies, illuminates, and perfects the soul). But are these the only alternatives? McGrath says…
NT Wright’s denial that justification is “entry language” is usually taken as a criticism of evangelical Protestant treatments of justification. But his denial cuts deeper: From the high middle ages, Roman Catholic theologians taught that justification was a motus from sin to grace. From Wright’s viewpoint, the Reformers agreed with…
Some of the summaries below were previously posted on my site, and are reproduced to help my students. 1) Derrida begins the book with a discussion of Jan Patocka’s treatment of the distinction between “enthusiasm” or the “demonic” and “responsibility.” The former “confuses the limits among the animal, the human,…
In his new Being with God , Aristotle Papanikolaou points to differences between Vladimir Lossky and John Zizioulas on the issue of divine energies. For Lossky, the doctrine of divine energies is designed to “protect the real character of communion with God” in theosis while also insisting that union with…
Thanks to my student Brent McLean for the following quotation from Schmemann’s Journals: “I reflect, while writing my Eucharist, about Communion, on the strange, mysterious alienation from it in the Church (on Mt. Athos - they didn’t regularly take Communion; in our churches, those who seek frequent Communion are held…
Stephen Jaeger’s wonderful Ennobling Love (1999) sets up some bizarre juxtapositions. On the one hand, here is Anselm of Bec writing to two novices about the join the monastic community: “My eyes eagerly long to see your face, most beloved; my arms stretch out to your embraces. My lips long…
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