Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Creationism is debated widely in the US, especially when it comes to teaching creation as an alternative theory of origins in public schools. Every few months, there’s another poll showing that many Americans still believe Ussher’s claim that the world was created around 4000 BC, which always elicits a contemptuous…
Walker Percy died in 1990, but his six published novels and his collections of essays are more relevant than when he wrote them. Percy was an American Dostoevsky, and that was no accident. “The European novels,” he says in a 1974 interview, “are more philosophical, more novels of ideas.” Dostoevsky,…
The Spirit is God’s agent for renewing the creation, for restoring bonds between nations, for knitting together people into the body of Christ. The Spirit is the renewer of the world, and the bond of all relations. That means that if you want your family to be knit together, if…
In their basic physical sense , the verbs translated as "persecute" in the Bible mean “chase” or “pursue,” and that fits the context quite naturally. As Pharaoh “pursued” (LXX, dioko ; Heb. radaph ) Israel into the wilderness, for example, so the dragon chases the woman back to her place…
Seng-Kong Tan’s Fullness Received and Returned is a densely argued, thoroughly researched, contextually sensitive study of participation in the soteriology of Jonathan Edwards. Along the way, Tan deals with many of the central themes in Edwards’s theology. As with many recent studies of Edwards, Tan’s monograph demonstrates both Edwards’s creativity…
The title of James Joyce’s first novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man indicates that it is a bildungsroman , a story of formation that describes the formative experiences of a poet who aspires to artistic greatness. The education described is Joyce’s own. The novel recounts the failing…
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Ken Jackson's Shakespeare & Abraham is not, he says, “a traditional study of literary borrowing or influence that primarily seeks to link Genesis 22 and Shakespeare via philological evidence.” He does note verbal echoes and allusions (Shakespeare's use of the Abrahamic “Here I am” at critical moments in some plays),…
Nearly all our terms for immaterial concepts were originally terms for material objects. Words for “spirit” originally meant “breath” or “wind”; we use “conceive” to refer to a mental act, but it originally signified grasping with the hand (42). That has led, Owen Barfield wrote ( History, Guilt, and Habit…
Barth ( Church Dogmatics , 3.2, section 44) discusses gratitude under the heading of “man as a creature of God,” but creatureliness needs to be seen in a particular way. Man is summoned by the word of grace, by God’s address and affirmation of man. We are “called into life…
Luke 1 is Trinitarianly odd. Our creeds, growing out of Matthew 28:18-20 and other biblical texts, speak of the order of the Trinity as “Father, Son, Spirit.” That reflects the order of the economy: The Father does send the Son; and then the Son ascends to heaven, and sends the…
It's significant, writes Walter Kasper ( Handbook of Spiritual Ecumenism ), that “Jesus did not primarily express his desire for unity in a teaching or in a commandment to his disciples, but in a prayer to his Father. Unity is a gift from above, stemming from and growing toward loving…
Nation states have enormous power, which can be projected outwardly and exercised within. We can bomb targets on the other side of the world; the NSA can find out whom you call when for how long. It's also become clear that nation-states are also deeply vulnerable. The most sophisticated technologies…
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