Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Minister: What is the true and right knowledge of God? Child: When we know Him in order that we may honor Him. 1 Recently, a friend confessed to me a serious intellectual issue he was having that was blocking his ability to believe and trust in Christ. We talked about…
We exist to renew the church for the sake of the world. We are scaffolding to help Christians rebuild God’s heavenly city that renews the cities of men. To faithfully carry out this task, we need your help . Theopolis eats, drinks, breathes donations. A trickle of money comes in…
In March of 2022, Uri Brito, Presiding Minister of the CREC, asked Peter Leithart to address the pastors of Athanasius Presbytery. Here is what he said to these good men. Thank you, Pastor Brito. I’m honored to speak to the Athanasius Presbytery this morning. And I want to take the…
Increasingly, I have been made aware of an idea and practice floating around in Reformed circles of the need for heads of household membership in a church, with its sometimes attendant practice of “male-heads-of-household voting.” What follows are my thoughts on the practice. The Nature of Church Membership For an…
What kind of future should we expect before the return of Christ and the general Resurrection and Final Judgment? In Daniel chapters 2 and 7, we have two visions representing future history from the time that Daniel lived. Both visions give us a timeline of four successive empires that are…
In the ninth chapter of Deuteronomy, Moses recalls the journey the Israelites took across the wilderness. He reminds them of all their sins and rebellion and of God’s faithfulness to them despite their sins. When he recounts the time when Aaron led the people in the worshiping of the golden…
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That’s Barthes not Barth. As in Roland. Prickett suggests that Barthes’ proclamation of the death of the author, his manumission of interpretation from the obsession with the limited, final, “secret” meaning, and his hope for a liberated “anti-theological” and “revolutionary” reading that refuses “to fix meaning” in fact opens the…
Poststructuralism likes to think itself radical, but Stephen Prickett (Words and the Word) points out that it excludes the possibility of novelty. Barthes says that a text is “a tissue of quotations drawn from the unnumerable centres of culture.” And Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality, on Prickett’s reading, encloses a text…
A few highlights from James Wood’s chapter on language in How Fiction Works . Early on, he mentions the “old modernist hope” that prose can be “as well written as poetry.” This will require readers and novelists to develop what Nietzsche called a “third ear”: “We have to read musically,…
Lewis remarks on the high difficulty of adverse criticism, noting that the difficulty lies partly in the fact that the defects of bad literature are found in good literature: “The novel before you is bad - a transparent compensatory fantasy projected by a poor, plain woman, erotically starving. Yes, but…
Lewis describes the process by which words that once expressed and aroused emotions by appealing to the imagination have been emptied of image-content and become purely emotional. “Damn you” used to be a real curse, because people believed in damnation. Now that fewer do, it’s a more or less purely…
In Lewis’s defense, he is trying to explain some of the limits of language, which are worth noting (this in the last chapter of Studies in Words ). One limitation has to do with language’s inability “to inform us about complex physical shapes and movements. Hence descriptions of such things…
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