Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Matthew 8-9 records three clusters of miracles, interspersed with snatches of Jesus’ teaching about various aspects of discipleship. Just as the Sermon on the Mount displays the authority of Jesus’ Word in teaching, these chapters display the authority of Jesus’ Word over sickness, uncleanness, the creation, demons, and death. In…
Since the early 1980s, several of the conservative Reformed Churches have debated and wrestled with the issue of paedocommunion (infant communion). The PCA and the OPC assigned study committees to examine the question, both of which produced useful reports both in support of and against the position. Though the debate…
(This issue of Biblical Chronology concludes a discussion of the Biblical and Assyrian chronologies, begun in previous posts. Click on the category link of "Biblical Chronology" above to see previous issues. Did Shalmaneser Know Jehu? Allis writes: "The Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser contains, in addition to brief accounts of the…
Movies Movies as an art form have a powerful impact because they take place in a dark room, on a large screen, with no distractions, and because they entail many of the arts: music, acting, choreography, design and color, etc. A movie can be an overwhelming experience for a young…
The Hebrew word translated as "grain offering" or "cereal offering" is minchah . Like the translation of `olah as "burnt offering," the translation of minchah as "grain offering" is somewhat deceiving, since minchah does not refer to grain or cereal. In liturgical contexts outside of Leviticus, in fact, the word…
"He shall then skin the burnt offering and cut it into its pieces" (Leviticus 1:6). The normal word ( `olah ) that is translated as "burnt offering" and "whole burnt offering" has nothing to do with either burning or wholeness. It is the noun form of a verb meaning "to…
Showing page 291 of 309
Showing page 4 of 43
Jerrold Seigel suggests that Locke’s self has “three different aspects”: We are selves to others “by virtue of what they know about our mental and moral life”; we are “selves to ourselves, but incompletely so, through the imperfect consciousness we have of our lives and deeds in the here and…
Murphy goes into admiring detail describing Thomas’s theory of interior senses in higher animals. Apart from its purely historical interest and the anticipations of later scientific theories, Thomas’s discussion has philosophical and theological interest in its own right. He claims, for instance, that there are a number of interior senses…
Robert Young claims that the controversy over Darwinism in the 19th century was not so much a religion-v.-science controversy as a duel between competing theodicies. At one level, he argues, “the protagonists in the debate were in fundamental agreement. They were fighting over the best ways of rationalizing the same…
Murphy offers an amusing discussion of the question, Assuming a Cartesian dualism of mind and body, how can the mind cause a physical object like the body to move? If one assumes that physicists are correct that physical energy can be transferred to a physical system, it has to arise…
Murphy makes this interesting comment, which she admits is an oversimplification: “the adoption of a dualist anthropology in the early centuries of the church was largely responsible for changing Christians’ conception of what Christianity is basically all about. I am suggesting that original Christianity is better understood in socio-political terms…
In her Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? (Cambridge, 2006), Nancey Murphy argues for a non-reductionist version of physicalism on the question of the “body-soul” problem: “This is the view that humans are composed of only one ‘part,’ a physical body.” She spends a bit over six pages near the…
Showing page 1810 of 2212
Your weekly digest for all things Theopolis.
